After her debut in Season One on “Taking the Leap,” I’ve brought Michelle Anthony LaCroix back for a conversation on how to move through our conditioned fears to do the small things that make big shifts in our lives. From establishing habits to trying new activities to putting ourselves out there in new ways, these small pivots allow us to experience more joy and expand our definition of who we are and what we’re capable of.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What gets in our way of making small shifts in our lives, like establishing new habits or trying something new, even when it’s high on our list of goals and intentions
• The paralyzing the fear of failure and the fear of not being good at something can be and how that has held us back both as children and as adults
• The “all or nothing” mentality we fall back on in order to feel in control and avoid messing up
• How to combat the stories we’ve told ourselves around failure, like “Everyone is sitting around waiting for me to screw up so they can say, ‘Ha! I told you so,’” or that “If I make a mistake, people will suddenly realize that I’m a human being and I can’t be trusted as easily.”
• Finding peace in the “worst case scenario”
• Keeping a “paper trail” of our self-in-progress to normalize our mistakes and celebrate our incremental progress
• The discouraging feeling we get when we anticipate something is going to be really hard and how to shift our mindset around challenges for our benefit
• Going after sustainable success and earning our “merit badges” rather than short-term avoidance of difficulty
• How we often skip out on things that would bring us a lot of pleasure and joy simply because we feel like we have to have a reason for doing it or that it has to lead to something important

Join the conversation around the habits we’ve established and the small shifts we’ve made in this past year over in the Permission to Pivot Community group on Facebook and on our Instagram profiles: @marissaburdett and @theheartyfig.

Quotes:

“It’s so much braver and stronger to take the risk and fall on your face and so much easier to be the Internet troll who is going to tear down everyone’s efforts. If that person’s never going to step up and do anything themselves, then why do they matter? Who cares. Let that guy be a troll and keep on moving forward.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“Anytime that we start thinking about ‘worst case scenarios,’ the best way to combat that is to start asking ourselves, ‘And then what?’” - Marissa Burdett

“The longer we spend avoiding the work because we’re afraid we’re going to be bad at it, we’re just wasting time. It’s an inevitable part of the process and we’re better off investing our time and energy getting comfortable with that truth.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“We need to shift from the belief that hard work is bad to hard work is worthwhile.” - Marissa Burdett

“It’s a lost cause to set out with the goal of avoiding difficult or hard experiences on your way to where you want to get.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“Success is fragile when you don’t have the experience and the ‘oops’ to back that up.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“There’s nothing wrong with being intentional, but our intuition doesn’t necessarily have words yet. Sometimes our intuition isn’t logical. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. If our intuition is guiding us in some way, maybe that’s reason enough, even if you don’t know where you’re going with it.” - Marissa Burdett

Check out the show notes at https://permissiontopivot.com and join the private, free Facebook group: Permission to Pivot Community.