This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - VI4P - Overthinking and Action (Chapter 8)

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Click here to get your FREE Confidence Building Workbook or visit http://eepurl.com/h_moXr   Every Monday I’m bringing a chapter of Validation Is For Parking: How Women Can Beat The Confidence Con) to life!  This week we go through Chapter 8 and focus on Overthinking (pages 24 & 25 in the workbook) and Action (pages 29 & 30 in the workbook).  Here’s what you can expect: Discover why overthinking is an epic waste of time Here some examples of the ways women overthink (just in case you don’t believe it’s happening) The antidote to overthinking is… ACTION 3 steps to move from worry into action Like what you heard? Please rate and review

I am Nicole Kalil and I'm reading my book, Validation is for Parking, to you each week in hopes that it builds your confidence and gives you a place that you can go and listen any time you need a reminder or a little confidence boost. The last two episodes focused on a confidence derailer and its antidote, one of the confidence builders. A confidence derailer is really anything that chips away at, does damage to, and destroys your confidence. And I've identified five that are impacting women at the highest level. To be clear, these confidence derailers

impact everyone, and there are more than five, but these five are kind of like the confidence kryptonite for women. And each one of these derailers has an antidote, a confidence builder. And each of these confidence builders works for anyone at any time, whether or not you struggle with a particular derailer. But I've honed in on these five as I've seen them have the greatest impact in women's overall confidence. And I have to say, I've yet to meet or interact with a single woman who hasn't experienced any of these derailers. I've never had a woman look at me and say, I have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, most women

are experiencing all of these derailers all the time. And people of different genders often say that they impact them just as much. But most of us have one or two of these that impact us at the highest level or the hardest. There are default derailers and they happen so fast or so often that we're not even conscious of how much they're getting in our own way. For me, my default derailers are perfectionism, which we talked about in chapter six, and the derailer that we're covering today, which is overthinking. Friends, I sometimes catch myself overthinking my overthinking. Like, am I actually overthinking or am I just being thorough or thoughtful? Or how do I actually know when I'm overthinking versus just thinking?

Like, where's the line? I should probably think about that, right? Wrong. Overthinking is costing us in more ways than I could possibly mention. But I will say this, if you're looking for more energy, freedom, and opportunity, you're going to need to let go of overthinking. How do we do that? Well, that'll become a little more clear as we go through chapter eight. And for those of you looking for extra support, you can find more on overthinking on pages 24 and 25 and on action on pages 29 and 30 in your confidence building workbook, which you can download for free by clicking the link

in show notes. So we kick off this chapter with a quote as usual, because quotes and memes are basically my love language. And here's the quote, thinking will not overcome fear, but action will, by W. Clement Stone. I doubt I need to explain what I mean by overthinking, but for women, it often shows up in wanting to feel, and I put an air quotes, ready, wanting to feel a hundred percent confident before getting into action and wanting to think through every possible scenario in every possible way in our own minds. Overthinking and perfectionism feel closely related to me. Perfectionism is that outward demonstration, while overthinking is a more internal one. But they share the same root problem, which is that we're not trusting ourselves. I see this play out so often, but especially with

new business owners. The early stages of being an entrepreneur are their own special brand of scary. In many cases, it involves giving up or stepping away from a, and I put in air quotes again, safe income. I've heard it explained as jumping out of an airplane and building a parachute on the way down, which feels pretty accurate to me. But the amount of women I witness who want to jump, but never do because they're too busy checking every piece of jump equipment and researching the physics of gravity and air resistance would blast your mind. They end up stuck on the damn plane until they run out of fuel. Overthinking is a waste of our time. Then, hey, I have a great opportunity for you.

It comes with more growth, money, and impact. You, hold on. Let me just overthink it. Have you ever done this? Don't lie. You know you have. We all have. Women constantly limit our own potential

for professional growth by deselecting ourselves out of positions, promotions, and other opportunities. In most cases, we do this because we don't think we're ready. But what's really problematic here is how we define ready. I can't tell you how many women have told me they don't feel 100% ready, which is basically the equivalent of saying, I don't tell you how many women have told me they don't feel 100% ready, which is basically the equivalent of saying, I don't feel perfect. They're waiting for something that's impossible.

The only way we can ever become completely ready for anything is by doing it and getting experience under our belts. We think far too much, far too hard, and for far too long. We feel like we need to know every damn thing and analyze every potential pitfall before we can get into action. That is preventing us from taking action, which you're about to find out is a huge confidence builder. Generally speaking, men don't engage in Olympic level mental gymnastics the way we do. They don't repeat conversations in their heads for hours on end and dissect every single word. They don't seem to worry about every possible outcome or overanalyze every potential pitfall. They don't ruminate for days about something that happened a week ago. I'm sure a few of us

would make the argument that men just don't think, but the point I'm trying to make here is that they're less likely to overthink. Colin Powell created a management theory that he used as a military general and statesman called the 40-70 rule. When faced with a big decision, his rule of thumb was to make sure he had at least 40%, but no more than 70% of the information needed to make a sound choice. Think about that for a minute. No more than 70% of the information needed to make the decision. And these were big, tough life and death decisions. He didn't want wanna make the mistake of taking uninformed action, hence the no less than 40%, but he also didn't want to wait

until it was too late to take meaningful action, which is why it's important to not go over 70%. If he got stuck worrying about collecting every possible piece of info, he'd never end up getting into action. He knew 100% ready wasn't a viable option. There's a lesson here that we can all learn.

Thinking is not a problem. Overthinking is the problem because it leads to inaction. And inaction leads to regret. And regret chips away at our confidence. If you talk to the most successful people or people in the later stages of their lives, they share that they regret the things they didn't do far more than the things they did. They regret the dreams they didn't chase, the risks they didn't take, and the conversations they didn't have. They regret not jumping.

Overthinking has the potential to create the same regrets for you too. When you're overthinking, you can't be in action. All those things you don't spend your time doing and all those opportunities you don't expose yourself to while doing all that extra thinking will build and eat away at you over time. Don't think women overthink. Let's consider for an example, the last time any of us went out on a first date. I know it's a painful memory, but bear with me. I think back to my first date with my now husband, Jay, and thank my lucky stars that he wasn't able to observe, experience, or witness the overthinking that happened on my end.

If he had, I'm not so sure there would have ever been a second date. And this is with somebody who was clearly into me, given that he ended up marrying me. There were dates before I met him with other guys that weren't so into me where the whole cycle of overthinking I went through was borderline psychotic. Jay actually liked me and I still allowed my brain to become a cesspool of head trash that consumed too much of my time. Here's just a small example of my internal monologue after our first date. Should I call him or wait for him to call me? How many days should I wait to get in touch? When we last texted, he said this, and then I responded this, and then he didn't respond. Did I offend him? Did I say something

wrong? Should I text him again? Should I clarify what I meant? Should I ask a couple of people to read the text and let me know what they think? Seven texts ago, I said I was going out of town. Maybe he thinks he shouldn't bother me. Maybe he's just really busy. But I'm really busy and I'd find a way to make the time to talk to him. Maybe he's not that interested. Let me think through every moment of the day and see if I did anything wrong.

I knew I shouldn't have worn that dress. Do my texts sound as crazy as I'm feeling right now? And what was he thinking on the other end of this? I had a nice time. I'll text her later. In addition to holding us back from taking action, overthinking straight up robs us of our joy. It limits us from being present in our experiences because we're so caught up in our heads wondering,

what does this mean? We sit there projecting all sorts of ideas onto other people that may or may not have anything to do with what's actually happening. When it comes down to it, overthinking is code for making shit up. I can't date a guy who doesn't like me enough to text me back. He must not care about my feelings. I bet he thinks I'm too opinionated or too career motivated or something. Maybe he doesn't feel comfortable that I make more money than he does. I bet he's dating other people. Maybe he's a player. Maybe he doesn't want a relationship at all, but maybe he's my soulmate. Would my soulmate make me wait like this? The universe doesn't work like that, does it? Maybe he's just a Capricorn. Oh God, can I really date a Capricorn?

Okay, I just looked on Facebook and he's not a Capricorn, but now I need to learn more about Pisces. Have I ever dated another Pisces? I know I'm not the only woman who's done this. How much time have we all wasted on this insanity throughout our lives? If I'm completely honest, the reason I got stuck overthinking during my first dates with Jay was my extreme lack of confidence when it came to dating and romantic relationships specifically. I'd had bad breakups, been heartbroken, and dated all the wrong men for all the wrong reasons. My past made me think I couldn't trust myself, and I was terrified of being hurt again.

I'm thrilled it all worked out, of course, but also sad to think I wasted so much time and energy on issues that didn't exist when I could have spent those moments invested in my life, as well as being better connected with him. I'm determined not to let that happen now or in any other aspects of my life. There's a better, more confident way to live than in that spiral. The antidote to overthinking is action. Action builds confidence and eliminates overthinking. If you take nothing else away from this book, please believe me when I say that action is the stuff of confidence building. You can't think, hope, or fingers and toes cross your way into it. You must act your way

into confidence through the risks you take, no matter how small, that build up over time and yield big gains in the end. If we want to get out of our heads and make things happen, we have to get into action far sooner than we typically feel ready. Understandably, this can feel terrifying or at the very least uncomfortable. Don't panic though. I'm not suggesting that you jump into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. My suggestion for embarking on any task that feels overwhelming is to break it down into smaller action steps. Imagine for a moment that I want to climb Mount Everest and I'm standing at the bottom intimidated as I look up. I, by the way, have no aspirations of doing this. I barely like hiking.

I can only assume though that it would be daunting. How does anyone climb Mount Everest? The only answer is one step at a time. But I'm guessing no one just wakes up one day, picks up some equipment, starts climbing, expecting to reach the summit. That would be overwhelming and frankly physically impossible. There are action steps I would need to take to climb the world's tallest mountain. Notice that I said action steps, not thinking steps. I might begin to build my endurance by working out on a regular schedule. I might start by hiking on a local hill or having conversations with somebody who loves

to climb or joining a climbing group. The point is there are a ton of smaller steps I could take to get into action towards accomplishing that big, scary goal. And at the end of the day, it would take a lot of practice to do that huge, seemingly crazy, insurmountable thing. None of it would happen unless I got up and got going one freaking foot in front of the other. So how do we do this? I mean, I can't really go through a chapter on action and not give you action steps, can I? You might remember that I touched on this process briefly in chapter six. For those of you who are how-to junkies like me, here are some

tactics that can break the cycle of overthinking and get you into action faster than if left to your own devices. Step one, list out all the worst case scenarios you can think of. Do it with a limit in mind so you don't get caught in the overthinking trap. This limit could be an amount like 10 things or a time like 30 minutes, and then apply that same limit and write down all the best things that could happen or the best case scenarios. Let's pretend again that I want to climb Mount Everest. I don't. And I've limited myself to five things.

Worst case, number one, I could die. Number two, I might lose a limb. Number three, I'd have to sacrifice a lot of my time training, which would mean giving up on other things. Number four, I might not make it to the top and I'd be embarrassed. And number five, I'd probably have to stop eating so much cheese. Best case, number one, I could say I did something very few people have ever done. Number two, I'd be so proud of myself. Number three, I'd be I did something very few people have ever done. Number two,

I'd be so proud of myself. Number three, I'd be in the best shape of my life. Hello, summit picture. I'd blast that everywhere and show literally every person I came into contact with. Watch me picking up my dry cleaning like, hey, have you seen me at the top of Mount Everest? Four, I'd probably meet some new and really cool people in the process of training. And five, cheese has a ton of calcium and calcium is good for bones. Ergo, I should probably eat cheese to get to the top of the mountain. Step two, ask yourself which list is more compelling, meaningful, and connected to what's important to you. I'm not going to lie.

My best case list is making me think that climbing Everest could be a good idea, but I also know it's not something I truly desire. However, it's making me realize I should come up with something similar on a much smaller scale. This kind of realization might happen for you too. Maybe in going through this process, the big goal still seems too daunting. If you're even remotely excited though about what you wrote down, you can take action steps toward it without totally committing. We call this a test. Step three, assuming the thing you're thinking about is meaningful, or at the very least you'd like to test it, begin writing down action steps. Write down anything and everything that

you can think of within a limit, like within an hour or a day or a week. If 70% or more of the things, the actions that you wrote down on that list are doable for you, then go for it. You're ready. Any more time thinking about it would be wasted time. Trust yourself that you'll figure out the other 30% as you go. But if you start writing action steps and you realize that less than 40% of them seem doable, then start small and simultaneously test and grow your list. In my Everest example, I don't even know where I'd start. I can think of about 15 things I could do, but I'm guessing there are 1,500 things that I don't even know about. And of the 15 things I do know about, only a couple seem doable to me.

So I'd start with one and get into action. Another example is people often ask me, how can you speak in front of thousands of people? I'd never be able to do that. My answer is simple. I didn't start by speaking in front of thousands of people. And it's true. I started by speaking in front of training groups of three or four people tops. And I was the most prepared and the most nervous and the most excited and the most worried I could possibly be. But I didn't overthink it to the point of inaction. I didn't

talk myself out of it due to nervousness. I showed up and I did the thing. And although it didn't go perfectly, I learned from the experience and did a better job the next time. Over time, the rooms were filled with 10 to 25 people and then 100 and so on. I can't say public speaking is a total piece of cake, but it's certainly not as nerve-wracking as it used to be. I still get nervous no matter the size of the room I'm speaking to because I care. I want to do a great job. But I've also learned that being slightly underprepared compared to where I think I should be is when I deliver at my absolute best. If we believe that

practice makes progress, then action is the strategy we use to build confidence, to trust our inner knowing and our ability. It's the way we demonstrate that trust. Think of it like proof. I can say I trust myself till I'm blue in the face, but when I get into action, I'm showing myself that I do. Action is an opportunity for us to practice and grow regardless of the outcome, and it requires us to be in progress toward what

really matters. We all have two choices. Success coach Jim Rohn once said, we must all suffer from one of two pains, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. My twist on this is that we all need to choose between two pains, the pain of action or the pain of regret. Which one will you choose? If you choose to act, you will build confidence and minimize regret. If you choose to overthink and remain in inaction, not only will you live with regrets, but you're also likely not be any closer to living the life you want. In those moments of doubt, when you're terrified of not being ready, remind yourself 100% ready is not a thing ever.

Getting over that thought is the key to improving every skill or talent in existence. Women have every right to raise our hands and put ourselves out there at the same rate as our male counterparts. That company should be made aware that you want that job. You should run for that election. Go apply for that scholarship. Get after that promotion and let them know why you deserve it. You are here for a reason and you have so much to contribute. We would all benefit from less thinking and a little more doing, less worrying and a little more trusting, less wondering and a lot more joy. The next time you find yourself worrying endlessly, stop thinking so much and get moving. They're called action

heroes for a reason. And the best news is that you can be an action hero too. Bring on the capes. Seriously, I think we should start an action squad and at the very least get jackets. When you think about what would be possible in our lives if we took all the time we're spending overthinking and reinvested it into action, we might actually take over the world. And while world domination isn't a goal of mine, it could be fun. But we would have to let go of overthinking, perfectionism, and head trash, which for many of us revolves around comparing ourselves to others. Things like if I'm not performing better than he is at work, I'll never get ahead in my career. Comparing ourselves to others and judging ourselves in the process

is a common practice we all participate in, which brings us to our next confidence derailer. There you have it, friend. That's chapter eight on overthinking in action with a little teaser for next week's episode on our next confidence derailer, which is a doozy, comparison and all the judgment that comes along with it. As a reminder, you can download the Confidence Building Workbook by clicking the link in show notes if you want to practice taking action. Because as we now know, action is imperative if you want it to actually work. So here's the big question I want to leave you with.

What is the best thing that could happen? Because if you're going to overthink about all the worst case scenarios, you better start asking yourself, what's the best thing that could happen to you? At the very least, just to balance it all out. And my experience of what actually ends up happening is somewhere in the middle, but usually closer to the best case than the worst case. Confidence is when you know who you are, own who you're not, and choose to embrace all of it. It's firm and bold trust in self. And validation is for parking.