Creating Your No-Guilt Zone: A Guide to Better Productivity

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. I'm your host, Doctor. Christine Lee, and this is episode number 218. In this episode, our focus is going to be how to develop a sense of loving kindness towards yourself. I have chosen this topic because I do believe that developing loving kindness towards yourself can be the fastest path towards greater success in all areas of your life. So whether you are stuck in procrastination right now or just wanting to elevate your current level of performance, I am going to show you lots of different strategies and practical steps that you can take starting today to develop a state of flow and success in your life so that your future self is really, really happy and well taken care of. Let's go listen to this episode together now. Hi.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:04]:
I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. For this episode, I'm doing something that I used to do in some earlier episodes, which is just kind of riff off a bunch of notes that I've been taking or a bunch of notes that I just scribbled down after some recent coaching calls with different types of clients. I have a program called Simply Productive, and it is a step by step program that teaches people how to let go of the limiting beliefs and the habits and the old habit patterns that tend to slow them down or hold them down. And I just wanted to share some of my thoughts from coaching calls like those so that you can have a sense of how I work and also get a sense of how you can elevate your own performance, your own sense of well-being, and just start running your life like it's a well oiled machine with no difficulty and with much more joy.

Dr. Christine Li [00:02:56]:
So I'm gonna talk today on the theme of how to just show yourself loving kindness because I do feel that most of the people who come to me seeking professional services, they are struggling with difficulty. They are finding their daily tasks and challenges to be difficult. They are finding that they are done with feeling like everything is so difficult. And so I've had to develop both for myself and for my clients a system and a philosophy of how to make things much more easy, much more doable and much more light in terms of tone and feeling. And so I'm going to share those thoughts with you now. The first thought I have is that it's kind of the basic thought here today. You wanna show yourself loving kindness. So you wanna check-in with yourself and see, am I really treating myself with love or am I just hating on myself all the time without even realizing? And the reason why I say without even realizing it is because we have this inner voice.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:15]:
Sometimes we have multiple inner voices depending on the situation or the person. And those voices can be quite cruel. They can be quite unreasonable. They can be mimicking the voices of other people, other figures who have been real people in our lives, who have been teachers, mentors, parents, adult figures in our lives who have sometimes been critical, cruel, mean, wrong. And we just wanna check-in with ourselves to make sure that we are listening to the right voice inside of our head, and that is the voice of loving kindness. Now, if you feel like you don't even know what that means, that you have been yelling at yourself for so long, You wouldn't even know a piece of loving kindness if it just rang your doorbell and came to your house. Well, I would say now's a great time to start developing a philosophy of only talking to yourself with words of love, with words of support, with words of kindness. And it may seem foreign, but it's just like learning another language.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:28]:
It may seem really difficult, but you can, with practice, really become fluent in a totally different way of speaking to yourself. I'm gonna offer you many other steps and strategies that you can do in this episode. But the general theme that I want you to remember from this episode is that you want to treat yourself with total loving kindness. No yelling sneaks in the back entry of your house. No, no, no, no, no. We're just going to fill your house, your body, your mind, your spirit with loving kindness. And I'd say this because I do feel like it is the fastest, easiest, most fun way to elevate your performance in all areas in your life, your well-being, your relationships, your productivity, how you get things done. It all hinges upon how you were treating yourself.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:28]:
So don't let that piece of pre preparation escape you. You really want to invest your energy on taking care of yourself and treating yourself very, very well. Alright. The second idea I have for you is to develop a no guilt zone in your life. And when I say zone, I mean, just get rid of the guilt entirely because I have found after so many decades of being a psychologist, it's been two and a half decades, I should say. I have learned that guilt is a very expensive experience. It's expensive because guilt takes up a lot of your energy space and your mind space. It takes up a lot of your attention, but it doesn't give you much of a payout, if at all.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:22]:
Actually, what does guilt give you? It just makes you feel worse than you already started out feeling. So my suggestion here is to say to yourself, to treat yourself to the concept that you can be free of guilt, that you can do your best, that you can make your mistakes when you make them or when they happen. And you can decide you're going to evaluate them, but you're not gonna soak yourself and waste your time being steeped in guilt and just feeling like you're the worst of the worst because I feel like that is not a good productivity strategy. That is a way for feeling low, for really distorting the situation, thinking that, Oh, wow, now my life is over or I've really wrecked things now. We just really want to move away from that negative, catastrophic, distorted type of thinking. And when you do that, you'll see it's like a cycle. You become much quicker and you'll bounce back so much faster from let downs or from disappointments or from mistakes or from challenges that you face. You will find that you have it in you to just restore yourself that much more quickly.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:44]:
The third tip that I have is you can replace that guilt zone with play. So that is the third idea. You want to develop this sense that life is a game, that you are a player and you're one with lots of support with lots of skills and experience with a game plan and with desire, drive and enthusiasm. You want to decide that your life is your magical game and you're gonna make it unfold in the most thrilling, exciting, rewarding, magical way possible. You get to fill in the adjectives and the adverbs, whichever one it is, fill it in the way you want it to go. But again, you start with the loving kindness, you get rid of the guilt and then you decide, what do I want to see in my life? How do I wanna play? I wanna full out play. I wanna have so much fun while I'm getting things done. I no longer want to suffer through the day or feel like everything is just such heaviness and drudgery.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:56]:
I wanna make things light and just get so much more done and surprise myself. That, by the way, is step number four, surprise yourself. You don't wanna make everything just run of the mill because that's no fun. That's why we love sports. That's why we like games is because we never know who's gonna win. We never know how things are gonna turn out, but we have our hopes placed in a certain camp or with a certain team or with a certain outcome. So by surprising yourself, I'm suggesting that you put yourself in the game and maybe you keep up leveling the level that you're playing at. Maybe you decide, well, I'm going to go for that promotion or I'm going to publish another article or I'm going to launch a podcast or that next step that you thought you weren't ready for.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:55]:
Surprise yourself and decide, you know what? I can handle doing this right now. I can handle the dopamine uptick. I can handle whatever challenges come with this new level that I'm deciding to step into. So be really good. Get really good at surprising yourself. It's really, really fun. Alright. The next step we have is to pay attention to your energy needs.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:26]:
This is something that I work with my clients on pretty much all the time, every day, every way. Because all that we are is energy. We are all energetic beings. And so if we're not paying attention to when we're feeling low on energy or when we're revving high with life energy, then we're kind of missing our opportunities to guide ourselves forward in the smartest way we can. I think when you know your peaks and your valleys across the day, across the seasons, across different challenges and stresses, if you aren't paying attention to yourself in that close away, you may be throwing your energy away accidentally because you may be trying too hard when your energy is really low, and you may not be trying hard enough when you're really actually, you know, kind of good to go, when you are motivated and you've slept a good night of sleep and you've fed yourself well and your body's in shape. You want to know exactly how to direct yourself according to your particular energetic state. Okay? If you don't understand what I'm talking about, I want you to take the rest of today and really take a look at how you're feeling within each hour for the rest of the day. Decide how am I feeling? Can I fit something more in? Have I been fitting too much in? Can I test this? Can I just look at myself and how I'm feeling with a closer eye with more of a microscopic view? Does that make sense? I hope so.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:21]:
That you're really taking care to see how you function and how you function best. Okay. Next step. You wanna keep flowing. Okay? You are taking closer look at your energy and how it flows across the day, and that's because the goal is to be in flow as much as possible. So often when clients come to me looking for help, they are in a state of stagnation. They are burned out. They are overwhelmed.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:56]:
They are feeling so behind on the tasks of daily life and on their big dreams, and they know that there's more to what they bring to the table. They know that they can be performing at a higher level, but they feel really stuck. And it's completely understandable that they have gotten stuck. I have been there. You know my backstory. I'm a lifelong procrastinator by history. And as human beings, we grind to a halt sometimes when our brain figures out that what we're doing is actually more harmful to us than helpful. That's why we end up finding that we're procrastinating.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:47]:
We've decided if I put any more energy in getting active using the system that I'm currently using, I'm going to burn myself out even more. That is the reason why people stay stuck and they don't exactly know how to figure out their path forward. And that's why coaching and psychotherapy can be so helpful because you get another person's view in on what is happening. And this other person, this authority figure, this professional, whoever it is, it could be a friend as well. That person has the advantage in that moment of not being overwhelmed and not being burned out and seeing that there are other options for you to take. And oftentimes those options involve getting closer to a state of flow. What can we do to get you back into action? What can we do to make sure that next action is not overwhelming to you? What can we do to bring you back into a state of loving kindness with yourself? Because then you feel at your most powerful, in your most integrated way, in your most I'm not afraid of life, of my own life kind of way. And that's a state of flow where things come easily to you.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:17]:
You accomplish things as they come and you feel accomplished as you go. So you feel like a success. That is my definition on the spot of what flow and a flow state will feel like. Alright? Next step that I wanna share with you is a really important one. And in my notes, I've written, don't waste after waste. By that, I mean, if you feel like you've wasted your time somehow or if you are steeped in that guilt state or shame or embarrassment or some other negative state, you want to allow what you need to allow, but you don't wanna pile it on. You don't wanna waste perfectly good, free, open space, open energy type of time by saying I need to punish myself for making a mistake or for doing the thing that made me feel guilty. So that's the concept.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:16]:
You don't want to pile on more waste of time when you've decided or you've seen that you have wasted some time. It is okay. We're not perfect beings. None of us are. Some of us may try to be, but we'll never get there because perfection is this imaginary concept. What we have is flow. Flow and our best efforts and our decision to do things with love and do things with hope, that's about as perfect a system as you can develop for yourself. So when you do make the mistakes, and they will happen, decide, I am going to use the techniques that Doctor.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:57]:
Lee taught me on that episode, and I'm going to reinstate the love for myself and decide I love my life so much that I refuse to let my time go to waste. I refuse to stay stagnant because that is not my natural state of being. I prefer to be in flow. I prefer to play this game of life with all the spirit that I've got. I've got a few more tips for you, and one of them is to avoid over focusing on results. By that I mean play the game, enjoy the process, enjoy playing. And if you win, you win, you celebrate and that's awesome. If you lose, you lose.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:50]:
That oftentimes gives you stuff to focus on a bit more. So if let's I'm thinking of the game of soccer right now. If you have a five game losing streak in soccer, it is likely that you're going to double up on your practices. You're going to maybe play some game tape. You are going to check-in. Do I need to change my cleats or up level my training a bit? These experiences of losses are really opportunities for saying I can do better and I can experience wins in the future. Right? So they are reasons for looking at things more deeply. They are opportunities for developing your skills at a deeper level and advancing your skills and getting those wins in the future.

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:49]:
And when you take a look at playing like that with the idea that wins are great, but losses are also great, then you will never be afraid of competition or of challenges again. You understand that life is just this constant source of inspiration and opportunities for your personal growth. And then you know what? You get to enjoy this. Enjoy that everything is just another wonderful, miraculous opportunity for feeling good and feeling good about yourself too. And one last tip is one that I use all the time. I really love this concept because I am pretty new to using it, and it's the concept of nurturing future you. And so I do this in a very small way every single day. I check-in with myself and I might take a look around at my kitchen, for instance, and say, what can I do now so that tomorrow me is happy? Do I put away the milk? Do I tidy up? Do I make a list of things to do today so that I know that a week from now I am not feeling stressed? So what I know what I'm doing a week from now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:21:20]:
And that's the idea, in a nutshell, of taking care of future you. If you have a tendency towards procrastination, that can feel like a skill that might be foreign. It really might feel like a different language, but it is something that you can learn to do gradually, I think. And I think it's something that really has a high payoff Because when you take care of your future self, it kind of makes your tomorrows go that much more easily. They kind of flow on their own when you've already decided, oh, you know what? Tomorrow I want to visit this friend. Oh, you you know what? I've already purchased the groceries tonight, so I already have the next three days worth of meals figured out, mapped out in my brain. So try to get into that mindset, that mind frame that I can do more today for tomorrow, and then set myself up for so many wins when tomorrow comes. I hope you have enjoyed this scribbled list of my ideas and the strategies that I share with my beloved clients, and I hope you use some or all of them right away.

Dr. Christine Li [00:22:42]:
I want you to understand that stagnation does not have to be your typical experience anymore. You can decide, I'm gonna turn my way of operating into a whole machine of loving kindness. I'm going to spare myself the judgment and the shaming and the wasted time, and I'm gonna look for more opportunities to grow. I'm here supporting you every week on this podcast and in my heart every day. And I hope you'll continue to join me on the podcast next week. I'll have a new episode for you. And to wrap up today's episode, I want to invite you to get the free download for today's episode on developing a system of loving kindness towards yourself. You can get that at maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/loving.

Dr. Christine Li [00:23:44]:
So it's maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/loving. I can't wait to share that with you and have a great week. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com, for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach.

Dr. Christine Li [00:24:21]:
Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.