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Welcome back to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. This is episode 101, Weighted Versus Unweighted Actions. Stay tuned. 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 and 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 fluff here. If you want to get a six-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.
Hello. Awesome. Excited to talk about this topic today. Some people call it massive action versus passive action, weighted action versus unweighted action. That’s what I started calling it because it was very concrete to me to think about it that way. There’s going to be actions that are going to count very clearly towards your result, and then there are going to be actions that don’t count for as many points, for example. The actions that open up a real possibility, the ones that probably took a bit more courage, were a bit more uncomfortable at first. Those are going to be the ones that are weighted more heavily.
Actually putting ourselves in a position to be rejected, for example, that’s a heavily weighted action, versus thinking about applying for a job and doing the action of looking up the job, reading the description, and then having a lot of thoughts and spinning around about whether or not you should apply or not. That’s an unweighted action versus the weighted action of actually sending through the application and then actually reaching out to the hiring manager on LinkedIn to let them know you’ve submitted your application. That’s basically the concrete difference between an unweighted and a weighted action. A lot of people are doing a lot of unweighted actions and very few weighted actions, and then they’re wondering why they’re not getting the result. That’s the concrete overall high-level example. I’m going to go a bit deeper with this.
There was another podcast that I did earlier called Inner Work Versus Outer Work. That was episode 89. This is talking about that in a different way, in a more concrete way, because the inner work is the work that you need to do to overcome your resistance to doing the outer work, which is the weighted actions. If you’re in the category of the person who doesn’t take enough action because you’re afraid of failing or you’re afraid of what’s going to happen, then you’re probably taking a lot of unweighted action instead of taking the weighted action. I’m going to give lots of examples here. This is going to be essentially a lesson on taking weighted action and the kind of actions you want to be taking that are actually going to produce a result. I’ll tell you some examples about my business and some examples from my clients, so you’ll have a really, really clear idea of whether or not you’re taking enough weighted actions.
The problem is, if you’re not taking enough weighted actions, you’re not getting enough feedback. You’re not getting enough wins. You’re not getting enough failures or losses. You’re not discovering enough, fast enough, to know whether or not you are on the right track or not. You’re just stuck in that place of “I don’t know if I should apply. I don’t know if I shouldn’t.” Maybe you apply to one, so you take one weighted action. But that doesn’t yield you enough results. Then you might be like, “Yeah, I didn’t get it. I knew I wasn’t going to.” Then you stop taking weighted action altogether. The reason is because if you’re doing this, you’re afraid of what’s going to happen. You’re afraid of not getting a response, afraid of getting rejected, afraid of getting into the role and then not being able to do it, afraid of failing in the role, afraid of success, afraid of attention put on you, afraid of being asked something you don’t know. You’re afraid of something. You want to avoid a feeling, so you’re not taking that weighted action. Something is stopping you there.
What we do when we’re in that position is often you’ll come and get a lot of coaching about the same thing, not wanting to take that action and be like, “Yeah, but I’m still afraid of failure. I’m still afraid of this.” Wanting to work out all these issues instead of just doing it. My mentor, she’s like, “It’s like you’re sitting in a chair, and you’re saying, ‘I don’t know how to get out of the chair. I can’t get up and walk. I
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can’t. I just don’t know how. I can’t get out of the chair.'” She’s like, “The answer is you just have to get up and out of the chair.” It’s like when you’re in bed and you don’t want to get out of bed because it’s cozy and warm. Eventually, you just have to make the decision to get up and go.
It’s a lot of ruminating, a lot of spinning, a lot of questioning, a lot of going back and forth, a lot of overthinking. That’s how we normally cope with not taking the weighted action. That makes you pretty uncomfortable, too, because you know you’re not really moving forward. You’re stuck in the same problems, banging your head against the same wall. You know it’s not going to work for you to keep doing that. You don’t like it. But you’re just not deciding to get out of the chair, essentially. What ultimately happens is your brain gets really good at creating this pattern of overthinking and being confused and being overwhelmed and feeling these feelings. This becomes your normal. This becomes how you operate day to day. This is how struggle is normalized.
We hear a lot of people talking about like, “Oh, it takes me a long to make decisions. I’m really slow at making decisions. I need to make sure I make a really good decision.” When you’re doing it like this, you’re moving along at a snail’s pace for your results. It’s all because you don’t want to put that foot forward where you could be in harm’s way. Potentially, you could get rejected. You could have somebody say you don’t have enough experience, or whatever it is you’re afraid of. You’re not allowing that to happen. Really, the worst case scenario is you end up right back where you were. There is nothing to be afraid of. But our brains are wired to think, “If I do that, I might die of humiliation,” or “I might die.” Our primitive brain is just telling us, “You might die, so you better not do that. You better stay safe here.”
As humans, since we want to do more, and we want to evolve, and we want to make an impact, we don’t really want to stay there. What ultimately ends up happening is you will need to figure out a way. You’ll need to make a decision to be like, “Okay. I’m going to start moving forward. I’m going to start taking some weighted action.” The alternative solution is to decide to take a weighted action and feel the discomfort, feel whatever it is you’re afraid of feeling, and then realizing, “Okay. It’s not so bad.” It’s like when you jump in a pool of water. You jump in a pool of cold water, and it’s super cold at first. Then you get used to it right away, and you’re like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, this is not so bad. I actually kind of like this.”
The more you jump in the pool of water, you do that every day, for example, you’re going to get better at it. Your brain is not going to resist it so much. It’s going to be like, “Okay. Yeah. I know what we’re doing. I know how to do this.” You jump in a pool of cold water every day. I’m not talking about ice cold water, polar bear water. I’m talking about a pool that just feels cold when you jump in. You’re going to get used to it, and you’re going to be like, “Oh, I actually really enjoy being in the pool. I don’t want to miss out on swimming because I don’t want that really uncomfortable moment of ‘Ah, it’s cold.'”
Why this works is because it moves you forward at a huge, fast pace. You move quickly when you make quicker decisions. Someone that I know, she was staying in this job forever. She didn’t like it. She was super bored. But everybody that knew her was like, “Yeah, she’s going to be there forever. She’s never going anywhere. She doesn’t like it. She could do so much more. She’s so great. But she’ll never go anywhere because she’s so addicted to the comfort.” You want to avoid being like her because, really, she was great. I think back, and I’m like, “What a waste.” If she had just been willing to change that story about herself, like, “Oh, it takes me a really long time to make decisions, and I have to be really, really sure. I can’t really move right now because this, this, this, and this.” She just had so much unweighted action that she was thinking about. That was her day to day. That was like that for years. For years. She’s probably still where she was working before. Unless someone else made the decision for her to move on, she would still be there.
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So you want to consider what your life looks like if you continue to just be one of those people that just takes a lot of unweighted action, a lot of overthinking, a lot of weighing and measuring the pros and cons, but never really does anything about it. Here’s some examples. Actions that do not hold as much weight, that would be thinking about planting a seed in the garden and being like, “Okay, but which seed should I plant? I’m not sure. How high do I want the tree to go?” There are some decisions that you do want to make. Right. But you can just make those decisions quickly. It’s like, “Okay.” Plant a seed for a plant or a flower or whatever. You can plant whatever you want. You can plant whatever you want. You’re just like, “I’m going to plant a seed.” Then you start questioning. You go to the store. You’re like, “Oh, but I don’t know what shovel to use. I don’t know what fertilizer to use. I don’t know what seed I should get.”
Then you start talking to all the different salespeople to be like, “Okay. Well, which seed should I plant?” They’re going to ask you a bunch of questions, so you’re going to be like, “Okay. Well, what do you want in your garden?” You might think and be like, “I don’t know.” This is an extreme example. I like to work in extremes sometimes. You get caught up in this tizzy of like, “Oh, my God. There’s so many options. There’s so many seeds I could plant. There’s so many things I could do. Ooh. Maybe I should plant a tree, and I should plant a flower bed over here.” Then you get even more overwhelmed because then you got more questions, and then you don’t end up actually doing anything. That’s unweighted action. The unweighted action is all the thinking about it, the thinking about deciding what seed, thinking about deciding what shovel, what fertilizer, where to plant the seed, what soil to use, how much to water it. That’s all unweighted action. We need that. We need the planning of it. The problem is when we get caught up in that unweighted action.
The weighted action is when you actually make a decision, and you follow through with it. The opposite of that would be me saying, “Okay. I’m going to plant a sunflower, and I’m going to plant it in this spot right outside my house. That’s it. I’m going to plant it. I’m going to find out how much water it needs, how much fertilizer it needs, where the best place is for it to be, and I’m just going to make these decisions. They could be right or wrong. The sunflower could still die. But I’ve made the decisions, and I’ve planted the seed, and I’ve watered it. I’ve decided where it’s going. I’ve given it everything I think it could need, and then I’m done. I’m wasting no more time on that particular thing.” I’m like, “Okay. Yep, that’s done. Now I’m going to move on to the next thing.”
That sunflower is now going to grow, or it’s not going to grow, and I’m going to get some feedback pretty quickly. Whereas, the other person is still at the hardware store or the garden center wondering which flower they should plant and what seed they should use and how long it’s going to take and asking a thousand questions about this. This is how I feel when someone is considering joining my program, and they have a thousand questions. I can tell that’s where they’re at. They’re afraid to fail. They’re afraid to join because they’re afraid of something. They might ask the nittiest of grittiest of questions, thinking that’s going to give them the security they need to join, when really, it can sometimes, but a lot of the times, they’re just a no. Nothing I could say would actually help them make that step forward. That’s how they’re probably operating in other areas of their life, too. They’re just overthinking, overthinking, spinning, spinning, and not making decisions.
That’s how it shows up with considering joining a program to move forward or considering applying or talking to other people or any other decisions that they’re making. It’s the same. That’s what their pattern is, a lot of unweighted action. Expanding on that example, they’re coming to me and being like, “Oh, I got to ask you a thousand questions.” I had one person who actually said to me, “How much PDF space will it take up on my computer? How many pages is each PDF inside your program?” My thought is, “What does this have to do with your result? The length of the videos, the amount of space it takes up on your hard drive, if you want to download one of the PDFs, has nothing to do with your result. Why are you even thinking about that?” This person is taking a lot, a lot. They’re going to great lengths to
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take a lot of unweighted actions, which means they are not going to get their result if that’s what they’re concerned about. That’s another example. It shows up everywhere with people who are in this pattern.
We’re all kind of in this pattern somewhere in our lives, and that’s okay. But if we want to get somewhere, we need to make some decisions faster than we have been. That’s going to be a huge blocker for a lot of you. The reason why you’re not where you’re wanting to be is because you haven’t made enough decisions yet. In the job search, here’s some more examples of some unweighted actions. If somebody says, “I’m still figuring that out,” what does that mean? What does figuring it out mean? What does I’m like? Or they say, “I’m thinking about it.” What does that specifically mean? It probably means a bunch of overthinking, going back and forth, spending a lot of time in that indecision. Or they say, “I’m compiling a list of ideal companies to work for.” That can be helpful as long as they’re like, “Okay. This is my list. It’s taken me a couple of hours to make. Now I’m going to start contacting them.” That’s where the weighted action is. But if you’re spending a week compiling your list, that’s a lot of unweighted action that slows you down.
You want to have some parameters around how long your unweighted action takes. It’s like if you’re going to learn code, or you’re going to learn how to golf, or you’re going to learn how to swim, you can read a book on swimming, you can read a book on golfing, you can read a book on coding. That all might give you useful information, but until you get out there and you start doing it, until you try to code something and fail miserably at it, until you try to hit the golf ball and get that physical experience of hitting the golf ball, until you actually get in the pool and see what it’s like to tread water or have that feeling, you’re not really going to learn anything until you make those actual weighted action moves.
Another example of unweighted action in the job searches, perfecting, tweaking your resume, getting a bunch of people to look at your resume, making a list of the jobs you want to apply for, weighing and measuring one against the other, reading a lot of job descriptions. You want to make sure that your unweighted action has a specific purpose and a specific timeline for when you’re going to move into the weighted action, because that’s where you open up the real actual possibilities. I was thinking about this. I don’t know if any of you guys watch Grey’s Anatomy. You don’t have to understand this because I’ll explain it quickly. But there’s a doctor on there. She’s a brilliant heart surgeon. Her name is Maggie. In her relationships, she wants to take a long time to make decisions. She’s like, “Well, I don’t know if I want to move in with him. I need to think about it. I need to weigh. I need to measure. I need to weigh the pros and cons. I need to decide. It’s going to take me a long time. That’s just how I am.”
But then I thought, “You know, though, the reason why she’s so good at her job, the reason why she saves lives and she’s so good in the operating room, she doesn’t do any weighing and measuring in the operating room because she acts very quickly.” I’m just like, “There’s no time for weighing and measuring in the operating room. There’s no time for overthinking and doubting. She just has to make decisions quickly. Sometimes she makes the wrong decision, and sometimes she feels terrible. But at least she did something, or the patient would just die anyway.” When you’re really good at something, you make fast decisions. You have to. Sometimes they’re high-pressure situations, because if she didn’t make a quick decision, if somebody’s on the table, and they’re about to die, and there’s three or four different things that she could try, she’s going to need to decide on one pretty quickly and go for it, because then, if she sees that’s not working, she’ll be able to do the other one and then go for it.
There’s no time for her to sit there with a little checklist and be like, “Well, should we do this? Maybe we should do that.” The person would be dead already. I’ve seen this with a lot of successful people. It’s like when you are moving forward and big things are happening for you and you’re making a big impact, and you’re failing big, and you’re winning big, all consistently. You’re not sitting there thinking, because there’s no other way around it, because thinking doesn’t lead you to the result. You can’t think your way
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into a perfect outcome. It’s not possible. Your brain wants to think that you can, but you can’t. It’s not a thing.
If I want you to get anything out of this, is that your overthinking, your indecision, your feelings of confusion and overwhelm, your spinning back and forth, going back and forth between one thing or another, that is not doing you any favors. It is not that you’re a perfectionist. It’s not that you need a lot of time to make a decision. It’s not that that’s just who you are. It’s none of those things. It’s that you are afraid to fail. You are afraid to feel something that you don’t want to feel. That is the truth. You have to come to terms with that truth. When you take more weighted action, you will figure out quickly that it is just like jumping in a pool of water and that you can handle it. Then you will actually enjoy jumping into the pool of water after a few times, because that’s where I’m at right now.
I feel like I have a lot of momentum moving constantly because I know that I’m not afraid to feel whatever. Yeah. I put something out there. Nobody sees it. Nobody comments on it. Nobody cares about it. Or someone writes me and says, “That actively is useless.” Or they say, “You’re terrible at that.” I’m going to be like, “Okay. Thanks for the feedback. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. Because I don’t know, I haven’t done it yet. I had to put it out there to know. The thoughts and the feelings that you have are going to lead you to the either repeated unweighted action or repeated weighted action. The thoughts that lead to overthinking and stuff are mostly, “I don’t know what I should do. I don’t know what’s next. I want to make the right decision.” Mostly, those kind of thoughts are going to lead you to a lot of unweighted action, like, “I need more information.”
I had a client who was a perfect example of this. She got into her role, and she was waiting for permission from people, thinking, “Oh, I need to ask this person.” For example, sometimes you do need to wait for somebody. But, more often than not, you don’t need to, I find. So you want to tell the truth about that. But she was waiting for permission for people to survey their team or something, when really, she just could have sent out the survey and got the results. But she was waiting for this person to respond for two weeks, and they weren’t responding. That was holding her up by two weeks. I’m like, “Well, what would happen if you just sent the survey and just CC’d the manager and said, “Hey, just so you know, I’m sending the survey out to your people. I haven’t heard from you.” She said, “Well, probably nothing would happen.” I was like, “Well, there you go. Why don’t you just do that?”
There’s a lot of situations where we think. Our brain is so smart at tricking us into thinking that we need to take more unweighted action. We need to gather more information. We need more of this. We need more of that, when really, we don’t. We’re just telling ourselves that to stay comfortable. As long as we’re doing that, we’re moving slowly. We’re not learning anything. We’re not progressing. We’re not evolving. We are staying spinning and stuck. Some of us might like that. Some of you might be like, “You know what? That’s where I want to be.” Some of you might be like, “No, that’s why I’ve been here for so long, and I don’t like it anymore.” That’s your choice.
I also wanted to share another example that I forgot about. I was going to share this in the beginning, but I’m going to share it now. I was working for a CEO of a company, one of my earlier jobs in my younger days. I was in my twenties. I’m 38 now. But one of my jobs was to be a personal assistant for this CEO who had a lot of money. He just needed a personal assistant to take care of his personal errands. There was a few business things here and there, but it was a personal assistant job. I was that person who, when I started, I was like, “Well, what do you want?” I would ask him a bunch of questions. He’s like, “Can you get me a sandwich from the deli?” He actually said, “Can you get me a ham sandwich or something from the deli?” I was like, “Okay. What kind of bread do you want it on? What kind of cheese do you want? Do you want mustard or mayo on it? What vegetables do you want on?”
These are legit. I thought they were legit questions. But he was like, “I don’t have time for that. I’m in a meeting. Just go get me a freaking sandwich. Don’t ask me the questions.” That’s the way that he
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worked. Somebody else might be like, “No, I’m very particular about my order. Here’s what I want.” He was not. He was just like, “Go do the thing.” This was a perfect lesson for me because I realized that I had to make these decisions, knowing very well that I was making guesses and that I could be wrong. That’s how I was going to learn how to work with him best, was by going and doing it and potentially doing it wrong and then having him tell me afterwards. That is how we worked. I started making lots more decisions. I started getting better at making the decisions. Then I started basing what he did like versus what he didn’t like, and then I started putting together what he might want me to do, and what was more likely of what he would want.
Then I started getting being really careful with my questions because I’d only be allowed one or two before he was like, “Okay. I’m busy. Go figure it out.” That’s how I started working with him. That was a really good experience for me because I had to do a lot of guesswork. Sometimes I would do backups. I would be like, “Okay. Well, I got you this sandwich, and it’s got this. But then I’ve also got this one in case you don’t like that. You can choose. Which one do you want?” He would make a choice, and then I would have more information based on that choice. But there was no time to be sitting there asking questions and doing a whole thing because he was like, “I’m busy. Just go do it. Just go figure it out and bring it.” That served me really well in my other jobs, too, because I realized, “Just bring everything to the person.”
In a restaurant, for example, if someone asks you for a glass of water and you’re like, “Okay. Well, do you want ice, or do you not want ice? Do you want a napkin? Do you want a straw? What kind of straw do you want?” You just bring the water, and you bring all the things. Sometimes I’d be like, “Okay. Well, I’m bringing two waters. I’m going to bring a napkin. I’m going to bring the straw. They can choose what they want.” That was my decision. In my head, that’s how I was covering all my bases. I was like, “Okay. Yeah. I’m just going to do everything. They can choose.” This is just one way that I found to be able to show up the way that I wanted to. Sometimes you couldn’t always do that, but the point is you just got to do something because otherwise, you never bring the sandwich to anybody because you’re like, “Well, I don’t know which sandwich. I didn’t know. I was waiting for you to answer, so I couldn’t bring you anything.”
Then you’re going to get fired. You’re going to be like, “Are you serious? Just bring me the sandwich or not bring the water because, well, I didn’t know if you wanted ice. I didn’t know if you wanted a straw. I didn’t know. I was just waiting for you to tell me.” It’s like, “Well, you’re fired.” These are extreme examples. Again, you got to work out who you’re working with. But when you are working on your own goal, you don’t have to deal with any of that. You just have to make the decisions. They could be right or wrong, just like they could be when you’re serving somebody else. If you’re working on a project or you’re working with a coworker and they don’t give you a ton of information, and you keep trying to get this information out of them, they’re either not answering, or you’re just not getting the information ever, you’ve got to make some decisions. That’s how you’re going to find out.
There’s always going to be the potential that they might not like it, that you might be on the wrong page. You might be on different pages, and you might need to make some changes. But as long as you do it, you will learn that. You can even say, “You know what? I didn’t know what you wanted, so this is what I put together. Let’s see. What are your thoughts?” And then, from those thoughts, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture, either like, “Oh, yeah, I was on the right track,” or, “Oh, no. I got this wrong. I got this off base. Okay. Sure. No problem. Now I’ve got a clearer idea.” But do you see the pattern of every example I’m using is you’ve got to move yourself forward. That’s your responsibility.
It is not their responsibility to come back and answer all of your questions one by one for you to actually feel safe in doing the task. It is your responsibility to make decisions and then go out and share those decisions, and then see what happens from there, knowing that no matter what happens, you can
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handle it. Worst case scenario, whatever that is for you, you can handle it, even if that means getting fired. Even if that means getting rejected. Even if that means having somebody tell you that you don’t totally did it wrong. You can handle all those things. The likelihood is those things are not going to happen. But sometimes they do. The faster you do that, the faster you find out, and then the faster you are onto where you really need to be. That is the difference in your life, the concrete difference that unweighted and weighted actions has.
This brings me to some examples of some actions that count in the job search. Making the list of companies, that’s an unweighted action. Actually contacting, applying, and sending a message to a real human, that’s a weighted action. Having an interview, responding, putting some stuff out to get an interview and then scheduling it, and then going to that interview, heavily weighted action. That’s a big action that’s going to move you forward in a big way, no matter what happens. On the job, making a decision and executing on something, finishing something instead of waiting for somebody to tell you exactly how it needs to be done. Weighted actions are going to be the ones that are most uncomfortable for you because that’s why you haven’t done a lot of them yet.
If you didn’t get a response from that person, that’s okay. Your action was still weighted, and it still counted because that was what was in your control. You can’t control whether they respond to you or not. But I can guarantee, if you write more, if you put out more maybes, so if you open up more doors, you’re going to get more responses. You’re going to get more yeses. You’re also going to get more nos, but that’s a good sign. It means you’re taking weighted action. That’s what I have for you today. Unweighted and unweighted action. I hope I got the point through. It is so important. I do talk about on the podcast in different occasions, there’s another one. It’s the two reasons for no results or low results. In this one, I’m talking about one of the reasons for not having results you want is because you are not taking that weighted action.
Now, the other reason, and that’s covered in that podcast in more detail, is the second one, that you’re taking a ton of weighted actions, but you don’t have the insight behind why they’re not working. A famous quote, I don’t know if it’s from Star Wars or whether it was from somebody else, but it says, “Insight without actions is worthless, but also, action without insight is worthless.” It actually goes both ways. Insight means all the thinking and all the research and all the preparing. That’s worthless if you don’t take action, because it’s a bank of information sitting there, but it’s useless unless you actually put it to work. Action, without the insight piece, is also useless because you could be taking a ton of action but have no insight into why it’s not working and not going to find that insight. Then you’re just going to be doing the same thing repeatedly over and over and over, and that’s insanity. That’s what I talk about in the other podcast.
This podcast was mostly about the people who are overthinking, taking a lot of questioning, researching, weighing, measuring, proing, conning, spinning, and confusion. If your main feelings are overwhelm and confusion, and I don’t know, if you say, “I don’t know,” a lot to yourself, you find yourself, you’re not moving forward very quickly, this episode was for you. I hope that changes everything for you. I hope you start taking some weighted action, and I will talk to you next week. Inside my program, we have the perfect balance. I won’t let you sit there in inaction for too long. But I will help you get your mindset straight so that you can move forward, so that your weighted actions have the highest chance of being successful as possible and give you the insight as to why they’re not working. That’s how you will get your result. That’s why the results in the program are inevitable. Join me in there for more help with this. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye bye.
If I were to sum it up, I would say the most common thing people come to me with is “I’m going on interview after interview after interview, and I’m not getting the offer. What am I doing wrong?” I’ve put together a freebie, where you can get this download completely free. It has the eight reasons that this is
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happening. I break down each reason very specifically and how to fix it. To grab that download, the link is in the show notes. You can click on that link. You just have to enter your information. It’s called The Eight Reasons You’re Not Getting Hired. I will help you figure that out. I will see you in the freebie. Okay. Talk to you soon.