Episode #47: Doing the Hard Work

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Summary

If you have a goal, you know that sometimes it takes serious hard work to get there. However, if you find yourself doing the hard work but not experiencing the payoff you were hoping for and you just don’t know why, this episode is exactly what you need to hear. 

As a high achiever doing hard work, why aren’t you seeing results? The truth is, this isn’t about questioning your results, but rather it’s about diving a little deeper into the hard work you’re currently doing and discovering why it isn’t getting you closer to your goals. There are two ways of doing hard work, and it’s all about doing it the right way.

Tune in this week to see why the way you’re doing the hard work might leave you lacking in results. Some hard work pays off, and some doesn’t, but if you want to do the hard work that actually pays off, I’m showing you why busywork isn’t the same as hard work, and how to do the work that truly moves you toward your goals.

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If you want to take this work deeper and implement it in your life, you need to learn all about The Unstoppable Group. This is my six-month, intimate, small group coaching experience for high-achieving working moms who want to live lighter and lose weight at the same time. I take my clients through a science-backed, simple strategy that seriously blows their minds. Get all of the details for the next group here!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why some hard work pays off, and some doesn’t.
• How taking ineffective action gives your brain a false sense of security.
• Why busywork is exhausting, but not the kind of hard work that gets results.
• How to use measurable and tangible results to see if your hard work is the right work.
• Why it’s always more comfortable to consume and keep researching instead of making a decision about how to move forward.
• What you can do to start making the decisions that get you more of what you want.
• How to get clear on your goals and the actions that will actually take you there.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

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• Hey, this is Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, and you're listening to The Unstoppable Mom Brain Podcast, Episode 47, Doing the Hard Work. Listen, if you have a goal, you know, just like me, that sometimes it takes hard work to get there, but when you find yourself doing the hard work and you don't experience the payoff, we want to start understanding and evaluating why that's happening.

  This episode is all about those moments to identify, especially being a high achiever when you're doing hard work but you don't see results. Don't question the results. Instead, what we wanna do is evaluate the hard work that you've been doing. Let's go. If you want to reach your ideal weight and create lightness for your body, you need to have simplicity, joy, and strategic decisions infused into your life.

  I'm a physician turned life and weight loss coach for ambitious working moms. I've lost over 60 pounds without counting points, calories, or crazy [00:01:00] exercise plans. Most importantly, I feel calm and light on the scale and in my life. There's some delicious magic when you learn this work and the skills I'm going to be teaching you. Ready?

  Let's get to it.

  Welcome back, my Unstoppable Friends. This is a short and sweet episode to talk to you all about hard work. Now, if you are a high achieving working mom, listening to this, you are very, very familiar with doing hard work. But when you don't have the exact results in your life that you're desiring, I want to help you look at the way that you've been doing the work and why it might be creating lacking results.

  Listen, there are two ways of doing hard work. There's hard work that pays off, and there's hard work that doesn't. When it comes to living lighter, feeling better and reaching your ideal weight, I want you to do the hard work that will actually pay off. This episode is for you if you find yourself working really hard, but not seeing the payoff.

  Before we really get into finding out whether or not you're doing this and how to solve it, I want to first talk you through why this happens, and then we'll get to identifying it and solving it. When you don't make strategic decisions in advance that you love, your brain is going to start to look for ways out.

  And this looks like a lot of busy work. So to paint a vision. I have come up with an analogy that I want you to sit with and let this analogy apply to any area that you have a goal for, that you feel like you have lacking results around. So, to paint this vision, I want you to imagine that you are sitting at your desk with a big pile of papers that you need to get through.

  And you spend a lot of your time and your energy and your bandwidth moving that pile of paper from one side of your desk to the other. Maybe you take a piece of paper off the top, you look at it and you read it, and then you put it back down. And then you shuffle the pile of papers, maybe going to the middle or maybe going to the bottom.

  Sometimes you'll think you need more information to start working on the pile more efficiently. You'll hop on Google or get on the internet and start looking things up to gather more information. And then you come back to your pile of papers, shuffling it from left to right. As you do this again and again, you start to feel exhausted.

  And not only do you feel exhausted. You don't see progress on your pile of papers. So not surprisingly, maybe you pull out your phone or you peruse the pantry just to take a break from your exhaustion. I'm saying this without a drip of sarcasm, but this way of working is hard work. Let me say that again.

  Pushing paper from side to side, picking a piece of paper up and putting it down and gathering information is hard work. It's exhausting to go from side to side reading and rereading that piece of paper. And it's even harder than the alternative, which we're going to talk about in a moment because the pile of paper has barely moved and you have no results or payoff.

  This type of hard work never ever creates results. I know it seems obvious when I paint the picture in this way, like, duh, Priyanka . You didn't actually do any work. You just moved papers from side to side. But friends, if you don't have results on the scale or for your body or in any specific nook or corner of your life, I want you to know that you've been likely pushing papers from one side of your desk to the other.

  When it comes to those goals. So how do you know if your hard work is the right work? You have to have measurable and tangible results to show for it. Now before we really get into the alternative, I wanna just take a little caveat on that paper pushing example that I was giving you. The specific step where I refer to information gathering. High achievers are notoriously brilliant learners.

  I see you because I am you. I know you love learning, but I want you to start to check in with whether your love of learning is putting you into simple consumption mode. You'll know that this is you if you research endlessly. You download plan after plan, or you try course after course. You get into a really familiar habit of consuming and learning.

  And the trouble with this is that passive consumption feels useful. I mean, you're learning after all. Right? But here's the truth. Doing this type of hard work, and just remember that learning and consuming is on its own hard work, is also giving your brain a false sense of security. Let me just say that again.

  As you do this type of work, pushing papers from side to side, researching and consuming, and Googling and learning, you're giving your brain a false sense of security. And the reason for this, because you are doing a lot, your action line looks full of a lot of doing, so you'll think that that means you must also be creating a lot of results when in fact you're not.

  Now, what I wanna just say, if you feel like this is resonating with you, is that you're not alone. I really want to emphasize this point because I think high achievers have a tendency of starting to judge themselves very quickly if they find themselves doing any of this. But I want you to know that if this has been you, if you have been pushing papers from side to side, doing a lot of busy work, consuming a lot of information, going from course to course to course, I want you to know that this is completely normal and I wanted to really shed a little bit of light on why you might have ever done this.

  If it's hard to do and we're not creating results, why would we ever do this? The reason is because it's more comfortable. It's more comfortable to pick up the pile of papers and move it from side to side than it is to pick the piece of paper up, handle it, and take it off your desk. It's a lot more comfortable to research the next thing on Google than it is to make a decision with the information that you already have.

  It's a lot more comfortable to consume course after course than it is to implement the steps that you learn in the course. So that is the reason. The reason is because it's a lot more comfortable, and so of course we naturally keep doing it, but this is only before you were ever aware of it. I'm gonna put my tough coach hat on for just a moment.

  The worst reason ever to keep doing something is simply because it's more comfortable. Instead of making decisions that are more comfortable, I want my clients and all of you to flex a muscle to make decisions that get you more of what you want, even when it's uncomfortable. Just remember that they're both hard.

  They both take work. They both take time, energy, and bandwidth. Pushing papers from side to side. Consuming and researching takes time, energy, and it occupies your bandwidth. It leaves you exhausted at the end of the day, but the worst is that it has very little to show for it. So let's come back to my original question.

  How do you know? The way you'll know whether your hard work is pushing papers from side to side versus clearing your desk is what measurable and tangible results you have to show for it. Measurable and tangible results are something that you get to define for yourself in advance, and it's evidence that your hard work is paying off.

  So let's go back to my papers and piles analogy. Let's imagine that instead of moving papers from side to side, shuffling and researching more, you picked up the piece of paper and you started making a decision on what to do with it. But to do this, you have to make certain decisions first in advance, you have to decide your goal.

  What is it that you want your results at the end of your day to be? We cannot skip this step. This is the reason that we sometimes end up in the land of vaguery and our brain starts offering us all of these alternatives, which is why we waste a lot of time. Don't skip this step. Ask yourself, what is it that you want your result to be at the end of the day or at the end of the week?

  Do you want your papers cleared off of your desk? Do you want to be one pound down? Decide that and state it out loud. Claim that goal as a decision. This is super important because it starts to give your brain direction. It leaves such little room for vaguery that you start to give yourself actual actionable items to do on a moment to moment basis.

  When you don't do this, when you skip this step of deciding what you want your goal to be, having that clear desk or that pound down, your brain will very naturally in the moment wonder. Maybe we should move the pile a little bit here and there. Maybe we should just have the cookie a little bit here and there.

  We have been so good. After all, we could just take a little break. That way of thinking ends up distracting you from the actionable hard work that will create more results. So if you have a clear goal, the pile of papers cleared by the end of this week. One pound down by the end of this week. You're keeping your brain focused.

  Here's the other thing I want to share. Giving your brain this type of constraint. When you give yourself a clear, measurable, tangible goal that is going to give your brain direction, that is going to make you feel so much more relieved. You don't start putting the papers down, pushing them from side to side because you know you want the cleared desks.

  You start taking action on it. This is how you'll know whether the hard work that you are doing is the right kind of hard work. I think it's really, really common and normal for us to think that our busy work is valuable. That's why we are doing it. That's the reason that we jump from course to course or consume more information or ever push a piece of paper from side to side.

  There's a part of her brain that believes it's useful, but the way that you will know is by really evaluating whether you have measurable and tangible results. The other little nugget that I wanted to point out is to not make hard work a problem. When you are in love with your goal, when you're in love with the idea of that cleared desk, when you're in love with the idea of being one pound down or fitting into your clothes better or having more energy, I want you to imagine what it would feel like to be in love with that vision.

  The hard work is never a problem. You won't make the mistake of thinking that saying no to a cookie is deprivation. You won't make the mistake of thinking that clearing that pile of papers is overworking. Now, there is nuance in this, and I think that this is why working with a coach can really help you unravel and unpack this.

  High achievers are so used to using deprivation and restriction to lose weight and overworking to get the job done that you might not even know when you are in both spaces. So I think working with a coach can really, really help you unravel this. Reaching your ideal weight, living lighter, feeling better and feeling more powerful is going to require hard work.

  But I want you to note that doing the hard work doesn't have to be a problem when you're in love with the goal and you have a clear strategy for solving the problem. Because that strategy and that hard work pays off. This episode was really designed to bring a lot of awareness. If you find yourself working really hard at something, but not having the results that you've been expecting. Rather than questioning your results or questioning the whole entire process, I really invite you to evaluate the quality of the work you've been doing.

  Ask yourself, where have I been pushing papers from side to side? Where have I been doing busy work? Where have I been consuming information rather than taking action. Just recognizing this and bringing awareness to this is absolutely going to change something for you today, and then you get to take the next step.

  Invite yourself to clear the desk. I'm telling you the best thing that you can ever do for yourself is that decision. Deciding that you want the clear desk by the end of this week, or that you want to see the scale down one pound at the end of this week. When you really focus on that desire, that goal that you want, the thing that you just feel will light you up, that you will be so proud of, I promise you, putting in the hard work will feel so good because you're going to have payoff.

  I really hope that this episode just highlighted or brought some awareness to the hard work that I know so, so, so, so many of you are doing. High achieving working moms notoriously are hard workers, and what this episode is all about is to help you make sure that the hard work that you are already doing is actually paying you back in dividends.

  I hope this was helpful for you, and I hope you have an amazing, amazing week. Bye. If you are loving the podcast, listen, you have to get onto my email list. I share even more gems with my email list on a regular and routine basis, so I want to make sure you know exactly how to get on there. You can join my email list by going to theunstoppablemombrain.com/magic.

  And when you join this email list, you're also going to get a short email training where I will meet you in your email inbox over a few days to help you distill down what it really means to feel unstoppable and to help you reach your ideal weight in the most lasting way. I don't want my clients or you simply consuming information.

  I don't want that to be this podcast, and I don't ever want that to be more email clutter in your email inbox in the training that you're going to get once you join my email list, I will be giving you tangible steps on how to take action from what you're learning. And of course, the best way to do this is when you work with me inside The Unstoppable Group.

  This is my six month signature intimate coaching experience for high achieving working moms who want to feel better, lighter, and lose weight at the same time. You don't need more time, better behaved kids, less items on your task list or more structure to feel in control. You can actually learn how to feel unstoppable no matter what life is bringing you.

  When you learn the skills and tools that I'm teaching you. I want this in the hands of every single high achieving working mom. So that includes you. I hope that you've been loving this, and if you've been loving the podcast, make sure you join the email list. You can get on there at theunstoppablemombrain.com/magic.