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Welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love podcast. This is episode 86, success blueprints. Hey there, welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you in your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No flub here. If you want to get a 6-figure job you love and create real concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Let’s dive into this very awesome topic. So, today I want to talk about success blueprints. So what is a success blueprint? It is essentially how you were successful before. And it’s so underdone, it’s so not even something we pay attention to, and it’s really a problem that we don’t. It’s not about cheerleading and being like, “Rah-rah, yeah, I did it. I’m awesome. This is great.” It’s not about that. It’s actually a strategic practice and a strategic move to get curious about how you were successful in the past. And I noticed this with my clients, they have achieved, done amazing things, and when I question them about it, they really have to think and they don’t really have that much of a clue, or they can’t really explain how they did it. And their answers tend to go to what they missed, or what they didn’t do, or what didn’t work, or how it could have been better, instead of owning the amazing result that was achieved.
So when this happens, when your brain is so used to that, it’s difficult for you to replicate and accelerate your success in whatever area. So we do things like not pay any attention to it. Leave the successful bits out and be like, “Yeah, I don’t really know how I did that. It was a fluke, it was just good luck. I had other people helping me.” They go, “I don’t really know how I did it, I just did it.” So it’s a really big problem, because, let’s say for example, you are an architect and you want to eventually build a monumental building, design something amazing. And it’s going to be a very big structure that’s going to be very impressive looking and is going to make history. Let’s say this was your goal. And you have to start by making plans for smaller buildings.
You have to learn the foundations, you have to learn what it’s going to take to build one house, a one story house. And then you’ll have to learn how to build a four story apartment or condo building. And then you’re going to have to learn these things along the way. In order to get to that place where you’re like, “Oh, I’m feeling confident to build my monumental structure. I have the inspiration, I have the knowledge, I know how to do it,” you’re going to have to have confidence that you know how to build a one story house that stands up, has structural integrity, is functional, and is beautiful. You’re going to have to know that you know how to do that first. So if you say, “Build the one story house,” and then you’re like, “Yeah, but I don’t really know how I did that. I don’t know. I just kind of did it,” then, how do you expect to build on that knowledge to then move further?
And it goes much deeper than just the step by step actions that you took, because you had a thought process that actually created your result of that beautiful one story house. And the thought process is something that we neglect to ever consider. We’re just like, “Yeah, I just did it.” So the problem is we’re not taught to study our successes. We’re not taught to feel good about them to actively study them and look at them and get curious about what created them. We spend way too much time in the thinking about what we didn’t do, what we could have done, what was not good enough, what did not work, what was not perfect? Even if you get a hundred compliments from somebody on how great something was, and one person criticizes a little thing you did, we tend to fixate on that one critical person and what they said and try to be like, “Oh, I got to fix that or make it different because this one person didn’t like it,” right?
We tend to go that way. And so looking back at what you need to improve is sometimes helpful, so I’m not going to negate that it can be helpful sometimes. But what we tend to do, and I caught myself doing this too, which is when we’re always trying to look back at only the things that need to be improved and
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how we could do better, and it’s making us feel demotivated because when you do that enough, you don’t even realize the results you’re getting actually. So I did this when I was first working with a lot of one-on-one clients in the beginning of my business and I was doing one-on-one consultations. I was fixated on why not everybody was saying yes to me. And I kept thinking, “Well, I have to go back and improve. I have to go back and do this.”
All the while I was thinking about improving and fixating upon what needed to be better and what I needed to say differently, I was neglecting the fact that I had signed a whole bunch of new clients on, just not every single one of them said yes and that wasn’t ever going to happen. It was just not a… It’s just like when you interview, you’re not going to get every single offer. And so I neglected all the things that I did. And if I could go back and realize that sooner and focus on all the things I did and do more of that that worked, I would’ve been a lot farther along than when I was wasting that time in, “I needed to do that better, I need to say that better, that didn’t go very well.” Because while I was doing that, I wasn’t feeling good. I was feeling like I wasn’t enough, I wasn’t doing well enough. And this is a subtle way that we have of criticizing ourselves, beating ourselves up, being our own worst self critics.
And sometimes, it can be helpful, and I’ll give you an example. It can be helpful when you do something, like say you build the house. And it looks beautiful and it’s great, and it’s functional, the client’s happy with it, you’re happy with it. But maybe there’s a pillar in a wrong spot or something. And you can just be like, “You know what? This is great, but next time, I would probably move the pillar to slightly over there just for these reasons. Just opens up the space a bit more structurally or wouldn’t made a difference,” right? But that is not a huge deal. You’re not like, “That pillar is ruining the house. I’m never going to get this right. It’s just kind of a…” You point something out and you’re like, “Oh, I think next time, I’d like to do that differently. Cool. I’m going to take note in my head, move on. Not a big deal,” right?
Just a little lesson that you take with you. And those lessons, you’ll know that they’re good lessons when they’re very clear to you. You’ll be like, “Okay, yeah. Maybe I would answer it like this next time. I would probably say this next time, because I want to,” right? Not because of the reaction you get or because of the result, because the result is going to be what it’s going to be and you’re showing up how you want to show up. But there’s that those two different ways to distinguish. It’s helpful to learn from your mistakes when they’re very obvious and you can see and you’re like, “Okay, yeah. I would do that differently next time.” It’s not helpful to ruminate over the mistakes and go too deep with them and spend too much time with them, especially if you’re not feeling good about that.
And I was stuck in that trap for a long time. And I look back and I think, “Wow, I really could have accelerated my success a lot faster if I hadn’t have been so fixated on what I need to do better.” So inside my program, The Six Figure Curriculum, I teach about the different kinds of evaluations that you want to do. And yes, you want to evaluate and I teach you a very specific way to evaluate, but you don’t want to evaluate to your detriment to the point where there was really nothing else you could have done and you’re just making yourself feel bad about it. So hopefully, that makes sense. So we need to… Getting back, that kind of went on a little tangent there, we got to get back to celebrating our successes and doing more of what’s working.
So the reason why we don’t do it, to recap, is because we are automatically wired to go to what we didn’t do well, what didn’t work, what we need to do better, why we’re not good enough. And so how we try to deal with it is we go like I was, we progress in our lives, just kind of headbutting against a wall being like, “Oh, what am I not doing right? What am I not doing right? What am I doing wrong?” Instead of asking what did I do right? Because when we keep asking what did I do wrong, we’re going to get the answers for what you did wrong. And those answers are likely going to make you feel bad, fuel bad emotions, or not good or bad emotions, but emotions that don’t fuel you forward. So an emotion like
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disappointed, or dejected, or discouraged, or demotivated, the emotions are not going to push you forward to accelerate or replicate any success that you had.
So we’re not generating the emotions that are going to fuel you in enoughness. Instead, they’re fueling you in not enoughness and they’re actually creating a block, and they’re pulling you back in your process. And so we end up getting into cycles like that and we don’t progress, we don’t improve. And counterintuitively, we think, “But I’m evaluating. I need to figure out exactly what I did wrong,” right? And I’m here to say, this was mind blowing for me, I’m like, “Actually, that’s not always helpful,” right? You can take the things you learn to move forward, that’s helpful. But when you’re thinking about the things that you need to do better, you’re feeling discouraged, and like you’re not enough, and you’re feeling those negative emotions that are not fueling you, then focusing on what is right, what you did do right, and making yourself come up with those things is going to be more useful. I promise you.
So why it doesn’t work when we don’t focus on what’s working is we don’t pay attention to the things that we can then replicate or build upon. And it starts to feel kind of foreign, like you’re starting from scratch again. So if you go to an interview, for example, and you’re not a good match, but in the interview you gave an answer. Something came out of you that you were like, “Oh, that was good. I saw them light up when I said that. I saw the person be really engaged when I said that,” and you didn’t get the job though, then that’s what you actually want to hang onto is that piece of information, what you said then, how you were thinking, how you were communicating in that moment that made the person’s interest peek up. And that is something you did right.
And it could be a very small thing that didn’t get you the result you wanted, but it’s something to build upon for the next time. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be very small things, like you got a rejection notice and you didn’t beat yourself up for days about it, that’s a win. That’s something you did right, that’s something that will move you forward. Or you felt like giving up one day and this is how you thought differently about it, this is what you did. A lot of students will tell me that sometimes, they’re feeling demotivated and they’ll go in, they’ll watch one of the program videos, and then they’ll be sparked with some new stimulation, some new interesting things to do. And they will change their energy and get back into action, and start to think and feel differently based on one of the videos that they watched.
So even doing that, being like, “Okay, I’m going to redirect myself. I feel like giving up right now, not feeling very good about this.” And even if you’re redirecting yourself, that is something you did right. That is a win. It’s a small thing, but all of these things build up, which creates that success for you in the end. And this is relating to the job search, but you have successes already. You have major successes already that I can pretty much guarantee you are not giving you’re self credit for. You haven’t studied, you don’t know how you got them. And this is a problem in interviews when people want to ask you about your past stories and what you’ve done, if you’re like, “Well, I don’t really know how I did it, I just kind of did it.” That’s not enough to get somebody’s to trust you and engaged in your past history, interested in you.
It’s not enough. So it’s really important in the job search and with interviewing and when getting a promotion, having a raise conversation, it’s imperative that you understand how you create success, so that you accelerate it and replicate it. And so that you can talk to others in a way where they feel that from you and they have no doubts that you will accelerate and replicate it. So what ends up happening is when you don’t give credit to your successes, when you don’t take time to study them, when you don’t pay attention to them, you are neglecting a huge part of who you are. You’re neglecting, say the most important part that’s necessary for you to show up in that confident self, and what’s already inside of you cannot be showcased because you haven’t shined a flashlight on it yet. So what needs to happen
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is you need to start taking your brain to the place where you understand your success, and it doesn’t have to be in the workplace.
It can be in anywhere else in your life, wherever it’s easiest to take yourself to, where you’re like, “Yeah, I’m pretty good at this,” right? Or, “I’m pretty effective at this, this, and this.” It can be in your job, it can be in your relationship. It can be in your physical fitness or any area of your life that you feel pretty successful at. And then I want you to ask yourself how you created it. So I’ll give you an example that’s completely not work related, and then I’ll give you some questions to ask yourself to get your brain kind of chewing on this. So one of my clients, I asked her, “What do you know you’re really good at?” and she said she’s really good at being a mom. And I said, “Okay, how do you know that?” And she’s like, “Because I know what my son needs.”
And so then we did a model, which is the tool that I use inside my program, a thought model. And we saw how that thought of I know what my son needs playing out in her life. So when she thinks, “I know what my son needs,” she feels confident as a mom. And when she feels confident as a mom, she takes the actions to figure out what her son needs very quickly, she observes, she pays attention to him. She recognizes patterns, she observes, she knows, she figures out, she asks. And the result is that she figures out what her son needs very quickly. And then she does know what her son needs. And that’s a way in her life that she’s very successful. And another person might have a completely different thought about parenthood that would yield completely different results. And so the reason I asked her to use an example that was not necessarily related to work was that there’s examples like that in so many different areas of your life.
And for some people, it’ll be in some areas, and other people would be in others, but the examples are always there. So if it’s hard for you to think about a work situation, think about the first thing that comes to mind, like what are you good at? What do you feel confident at? And then break down your own thought process for how that works for you. Why are you successful at that? So for example, another parent might be worrying about not being a good parent and they might think, “I don’t know what my kid wants or needs,” and that’s their thought. And so that thought creates uncertainty, and then their actions are that they keep telling themselves that they don’t know what their kids need. And then they’re going to find evidence of not knowing, they might try something, it might not work.
The kid might keep crying or the kid… It might not work. And then they’re going to be like, “Yep. See, I told you, I don’t know what my kid needs.” And it’ll reaffirm that they don’t know and that they can’t get it right. And that’s a very simple example of the same circumstance. Being a parent. And so at work, in your career, you want to come to these examples, but I just wanted to break it down so that you could use a different example if it was hard, sometimes it’s hard for people to wire their brain in this way or take their brain into this space because they’re really not used to doing it right. So some questions that you can ask yourself to start taking your brain to this place are, think of a result you’ve created that you were proud of. So maybe you completed a project, maybe you won an award.
Maybe you fixed a process, shortened it, made it more efficient. What are you most proud of about what you created? How were you resourceful in creating it? How are you resilient? How are you responsible for it? So one thing a lot of my clients do is they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, but it wasn’t me. I had a team and I had this person and I had this person.” And I’m like, “Okay, great, but how are you responsible? And how are you responsible for interacting with those people that make it all come together?” You just want to bring it back to that. How were you responsible in creating this? What were you thinking when you created it? What was your thought process? So for a lot of my clients, it’ll be like, “I know how to figure things out. I know what I’m doing here. I know who to ask. Maybe I am resourceful.”
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And that’s going to generate feelings of confidence, of motivation, of… The feelings that they need to keep going at something. Even if it’s hard. Keep going at a problem until they get it solved when a lot of other people would’ve given up. Another question is what does the success show you about what you are capable of? So why this works so well is because when you’re feeling more successful and when you’re grounded in these successes that you have had, you will feel exhilarated, when you get into that space. And you can look and be like, “Wow, okay. I do understand how I created that which means I can now build my four story condo. I built my little house. Now, I can build my four story condo,” right? And you feel more confident in being able to build it because you have the foundational skills.
And it’s not just about the actions you took, it was about the thought and feeling behind the actions, and why that worked in harmony and why you were able to create the result. And it will help you to accelerate and create more of what you created. So just try it, okay? I promise you will feel differently if you start taking your brain to this place more often. And I was in a Mastermind once where they said, “You have to go every 30 days and write down everything that you’re doing right. Everything that’s working, everything that you succeeded at.” And I had to find all the small, all the big things, all the… Whatever. And that was my job for 30 days. And it rewired my brain in such a way that it is very easy for me to come up with things that are working now.
To the point where it’s sometimes even hard to come up with things that are not working, because when I start doing that, I end up… I was writing my year end review, and I was like, “Okay, these are all the things that worked in 2021 and these are the things that didn’t work.” And I started writing out the things that didn’t work and they started turning into things that ended up working. I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. This didn’t work, but I learned this, this, and this.” And so it became just so grounded and it became a new neural pathway for me, which was to go to what was working instead. And I kind of laughed at myself. I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe this is how my brain is now thinking. Cool. And this will work.” So just try it, just trust me. And in the beginning, it might be challenging if you’re not used to taking your brain there, it might be challenging.
So what you’re going to need to do is stick with it. So if you can’t think of things right away, give yourself some time, be like, “Okay, I’m going to start being open to looking at what’s working for me right now. I’m going to start to let go of being my own worst self critic. I don’t want to be such a good critic of myself anymore. I’m not interested in doing that anymore. And I’m letting that go. And I’m inviting in all the things that are working for me, that I am effective at, that I am efficient at, that I am learning, that I am creating. And be open and willing to entertain that as a new way of thinking.” And what you will create are different feelings for yourself, are a different experience of the same circumstance. So imagine, you’re working on a project, let’s use this example.
So two people are working on the same project. They both finish at the same time. They both achieved the results that the project required. They both did a good job. Let’s say they were both on time and on budget and everything. They got it done. It wasn’t perfect in either situation because nothing is. So they had roadblocks, they had problems along the way, they probably had disagreements with people. They had all sorts of… They had delays, they had the normal issues that would happen. People taking a long time to make decisions, whatever. But at the end, they both got the project completed. And so one person, if they haven’t listened to this podcast or they’re not used to thinking this way, they might be like, “But this went wrong and this went wrong and went wrong, and we didn’t do this and we should have done this, we should have done this.”
And then they start to just feed their brain with that information. And then they start to tell themselves, “Yeah, I’m really not that good at projects. I really didn’t do that good of a job. There was so much I should have done differently. I misunderstood this one person, and then we were delayed here and that was a mistake I made.” And you just go down this rabbit hole, very easily, of all the things that you could
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have done better. And then the other person starts with what worked, what they did right. So the first thing that they’ll say is, “We got the results we wanted. We were on time. We were on budget. We were successful.” “Okay. How are you successful? What led to that success?” It was like, “Okay. Our willingness to pivot when things weren’t working, my willingness to jump on it right away and start asking things, clear up the misunderstanding. Once I figured it out, I jumped on it right away and I fixed it.”
Things like that. They’re going to start thinking down a different rabbit hole. And at the end of their evaluation, they’re going to be like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. So it wasn’t perfect.” And yes, they can definitely list the things that didn’t work as well. But they have to start with what worked in order for them not to go down that miserable rabbit hole where they start feeling bad. And then you don’t want to think about what worked after that because you’re just like, “I suck.” So then you want to list out the things factually, just data points of what could have been different, and make sure that they’re actually helpful and applicable to you next time. And they’re just data points. They’re not personal, they’re not things that mean anything about you.
They’re just a part of the process. And that is all experience which is learning, which is growth, which is value. So when you go to talk about that project with somebody else, you’re not going to want to start with the things that went wrong, because you don’t want to go to an interview and tell them, “Oh, well, we did get the results, but I sucked and this happened and this happened, and we didn’t do this and we didn’t do this.” The interview’s going to be like, “Oh, that doesn’t sound very good.” But if you go to them and you’re like, “Okay, well these are the things that we accomplished, this is what I learned, this is how I feel about it,” and you’re in a totally different energy space about it, they’re going to see you as a different person in a different energy.
They’re going to see you as the person who’s like, “Okay. So they achieved the results and they learned all these things, which they’re now going to bring to our space and they’re going to apply their new knowledge here. What they learned is valuable, it’s gold.” Versus somebody who’s interviewing and talking about their accomplishments in a way where they’re thinking, “Oh, I messed up. I really should have done better. This went wrong and this went wrong.” You see the difference in energy there. So that’s how you create the result in an interview. And that’s how it all ties back to why it is so incredibly important to honor, acknowledge, study your success. So it is so important. And this is one of the components that I teach in my program about your value, and breaking it down and understanding it and being able to study it.
This is a key component of that. So if you want to go deeper with this, join us inside The Six Figure Curriculum where I coach you live, lifetime access. You literally pay one time and you are enrolled for lifetime access. You get the weekly calls and you get all the information inside the curriculum, all the teachings, all the coachings, all the mindsets that have led my clients to their incredibly unreasonable results that people said were not possible. And I will see you in there. That’s what I got for you this week. All right. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.
I felt like there was a huge shift. I came into interviews from a completely different mindset. I was just more curious in what they had to offer, knowing that where my value could be. I now find myself in a role of instructional designer, which is a part of a learning and development industry.
Did you love this podcast episode? This is only a tiny fraction of the kind of breakthroughs, mind blowing explosions, and career upgrading magical stuff that happens when you join The Six Figure Curriculum. And it’s all available to you right now. Join to get immediate access to the video modules and get started. And the kind of things that you’ll end up saying are going to stick with interviewers for hours after they talk to you. They’re going to be obsessed. They’re going to perceive your value so much higher once you start seeing it yourself. And when you join us before March 31st, you’re going to get a hard
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copy of The Six Figure Curriculum workbook, mailed to you. Yeah, that’s right, in the mail. It’s really satisfying to have that in your hands if you’re anything like me, I really like to have a tactile thing to work with.
And if I might say it, it’s not like any book you’ve really read. It’s not like what you imagine. It’s a deep, interactive, best friend, so to speak, that will keep you on track and deeply focused in the work to land your premium offer in the next eight weeks or less. I can’t wait for you to get your hands on it. And if you’re impatient, like me, there’s all the information for you to get oriented and get started right away. And you get immediate access to that, as well as the live Zoom calls every week and the LinkedIn party that we’re having inside the private LinkedIn community as soon as you sign up. I will see you in there. And remember, March 31st, get your hard copy.