Dismantling Obstacles: Elevate Your Self-Support for Peak Performance with Dr. Christine Li

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Hello. Hello. This is the Make Time For Success podcast. I'm doctor Christine Li, your host, and this is episode number 167. You may remember a few episodes ago, I mentioned that I planned on focusing a bit more on solo episodes on this podcast going forward. And this episode marks the beginning of that effort. I'm really excited to try this new experience out and I'm excited to bring new personal content to you so that we can help you develop your peak performance. Today's episode is all about how you can support yourself for peak performance by dismantling the obstacles that might be in your way, whether it's in your space, in your mind, in your body, in your heart.

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:56]:
I have lots of different strategies to share with you today. And just to give you a sense of what's coming up in the rest of the series, episode number 2 of the series is called connecting with your unique talents, which I think is a very important practice to know what you're really good at. Episode number 3 is how to build unshakable trust in yourself. And then the last episode in the series is called Mastering Time Strategies to Prevent Energy Drain. As you can see, there are lots of different components of personal wellness and personal excellence, and I hope to show you lots of different strategies, meaningful and easy to implement strategies that can help you to elevate your own performance. I'm so excited to start this. Let's go do this together now. Hi.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:57]:
I'm doctor Christine Li and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination 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. Hello, my friends. I am back on the podcast, and I have put together this great series of solo episodes for you. The theme is really developing leadership within your self.

Dr. Christine Li [00:02:56]:
That has been a topic that has been on my mind lately. I love the phrase, the leader within and I thought we'd kick off this 4 part podcast series with our 1st episode today. It's called dismantling obstacles, elevate your self support for peak performance. And I think I'm just gonna go through this list as the ideas came to me. I'm just gonna go straight through my notes and we're going to discuss how to put together a consistent personal practice where you learn to clear the obstacles that might be in your space, in your body, in the objects that are in your life, in your mind. Because when we're working with obstacles, we slow ourselves down and my goal for you is to really help you clear those pesky obstacles, clear the junk out of your space, clear the stress out of your body so that you can really consistently show up for yourself and your loved ones, consistently do your best in work and in life and in your hobbies, whatever you wanna put your mind to. We all love it when we're in that flow state and my hope is that these tips and strategies are gonna help you get there faster. The 1st item that came to mind for me is a simple one.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:26]:
My recommendation is that you get outside. You get into nature. It might not be necessarily in the woods, but if you can get to the woods, great. Because the woods, I think, the forests, the trees, the leaves, the foliage, being in nature really has a way of clearing out the stresses that we have taken on and that the world has put upon us. You get this immediate experience of being in a different state, of feeling like there's a release happening, that there's an opening up, that maybe there's a healing bit that nature can give to us. It makes us connect more cleanly, if I might say that, to ourselves. So if you have the feeling that you're just not flowing with yourself, the ideas are not coming, you're feeling worn out, I really suggest getting outside. Maybe it's just your front stoop or to your back patio or to your neighbor's house just walking over a few steps, but just breathing in the clean air, getting out into nature is going to give you a little bit of a jumpstart and a restart so that you can settle in again and get that clarity and flow back.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:44]:
The 2nd idea that I have for you is to look at how your thoughts about yourself are stopping you from having real clarity and having your true emotions help you get through tricky situations or work situations that you need to navigate. I want you to think to yourself, how often am I rejecting my own thoughts? I'll give you some examples. Let's say you have this running belief that you're just not that good a writer. I think many of us have had thoughts like that in the past, if not currently. So if you have a constant and nagging thought that you're not a very good writer, what are the chances that you're actually going to fully explore all the thoughts that come to mind when you're thinking, when you're trying to write an essay, when you're trying to get that assignment done, I think the chances are very high that you're going to be rejecting of yourself. And then that sets up this stress drama where you're really having to suffer in strain to get the good ideas instead of just sorting through like, you're flipping through a magazine of all the different thoughts that are coming to mind and then just enjoying picking out the select few that you think are really good. So basically, that's a long way of trying to describe a process where you don't reject the thoughts and the feelings and the dreams that come to your mind. Accept everything as it is.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:29]:
You don't have to use all of it. You don't have to use the crappy material. We all have some ideas that are just not that good, so you don't have to use this material, but you can give yourself the freedom to generate in a very productive way that you can trust yourself to always have ideas coming to the front of your mind just when you need them. You wanna have the experience of having more ideas that then you can use. That's a really fun place to get to and it's much easier to create when you have the mindset of everything's gonna be okay, I'm okay. Let me just see what my brain can come up with now. That you're not in this rejection, self criticizing mode. I promise you, technique will give you a sort of mastery, this technique will give you a sort of mastery over your thoughts and feelings.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:26]:
You're gonna be like a ninja. You're gonna know exactly where to put your focus. You're gonna know exactly what that thought can connect within the stuff that you've already written. You're gonna just grow and produce and be this creative machine and it's gonna be amazing. The general idea for step number 2 is to get rid of all those funny filters that you've erected over the years innocently like the filter that says you're not that good a writer, just get rid of that thought and see what comes to mind when you do. Strategy number 3 that I have for you is to examine the level of trust that you have for yourself. I will have to share with you before I get into my notes on step 3 that in putting together this podcast series, I had to struggle with my own self doubt. I have never really dug very deep in my solo episodes.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:26]:
I give you some reflections and all of that. And I certainly try to help you with my ideas, but I've never really put together a meaningful series and so I got a little bit nervous. But I decided, you know what, I really want you to have these ideas. I really wanna help you to develop your self support so that you can be a peak performer. And in order for me to do that, I have to trust myself. I have to get over the struggle bus. I have to get over the fears that this isn't good enough. And I'm really happy that I'm at this point of recording because this is the sign that I've actually survived at this process and you will as well.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:11]:
So the content for step 3, which is, you know, look at the level of trust you have for yourself, requires you to really understand the moments where you don't fully trust yourself. Maybe it's setting up a new podcast episode for yourself. Maybe it is introducing yourself to a new person. Maybe it is in designing your future vision for yourself where you get nervous, where you start to get constrained, where you start not to be such a great imaginer of your future. And I would love for you to develop a deeper trust in yourself. Instead of feeling disconnected to your future, I would love for you to kind of pump it up to really start dreaming, Start small you can start small, but start with things that you know make you excited, that make you feel like you wanna run towards that picture, get connected with what is meaningful to you. And when you get better at imagining things for yourself and feeling connected to those visions, you will find that you will also get better at receiving that good stuff too. That when you start imagining, oh, that better job that I have my eye on, I'm gonna really connect with the idea of me occupying and securing that job and then all of a sudden your mind is gonna put together more ideas for how you're gonna get closer to that job.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:48]:
You might start to think of someone that you know at that firm or someone that you know in that industry. You're gonna start noticing news about that particular idea. You get what I mean? The universe has a way definitely of conspiring with us to get us what we want And when you trust yourself at a very deep level and you trust your ideas and your visions, then the universe has a very clear template to work from. The universe and your mind and brain and body can collaborate to get you what you desire. We can all learn to dream and we can all learn to dream on a bigger level, but what also needs to come when we practice dreaming on a bigger level is taking bigger action as well. So this is also part of strategy number 3, learning to trust yourself at a deeper level. When you learn that you need to match action with your wishes, that your thoughts need to be followed up with direct action, you will experience a deeper trust in yourself. It's not just a blind faith in yourself.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:04]:
You will have the experience to back up that trust. You will feel so grounded and so confident and so experienced. You'll be like the veteran of the situations that you find yourself in. You'll be the person who has the stories of how to do things really well, of how to avoid the trouble spots, of how to really excel. And I would love for you to trust yourself in that kind of way where you know that experimenting is safe, where you know that new opportunities are just fertile ground for learning wonderful lessons in life, where you know that every time you move out of your comfort zone, you learn something really beautiful about yourself, something really important and interesting about yourself. So go for that self trust. It's really such a core tool for productivity, but even more importantly for well-being. When you trust yourself, everything tends to work out a little bit better.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:13]:
Strategy number 4 is a really good one, it's a really important one. I want you to see how the things that you're involved in, the things that you might be struggling with right now might be much, much easier. Like I mentioned a couple minutes before or earlier, I did a little bit of a struggle dance with putting together this series of 4 episodes because of self doubt, a little bit of self doubt. But I just kind of came to terms with the project. I knew I was committed to the project, which always makes things easier by the way. And I decided how do I make this exciting for me to write and how do I get topics that I'm excited about? And when I did that, you know what happened, I found that my thoughts really flowed, that I came up with a lot of strategies that I wanted to share with you that made sense, that were coherent, that were useful, but I needed to pivot away from that feeling that I was in that this is above my head or this is more than I really asked for when I signed up to do this podcast. And I realized when I made that pivot that I could find the easy way through, and I just want you to stop right now and consider the stuff that I'm involved in right now. Is there a way that I can use my brain, use my intuition, use my experience, use my colleagues or my friends, use what I know already to make this process much easier? Can you just use your intuition? Can you repurpose something? Can you decide you're not gonna worry about what other people think? Can you use a timer and give yourself the freedom of having an actual deadline for worrying about things so that you can't worry yourself into months of lost time and months of lost productivity.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:22]:
Nobody wants that for you. I know you don't want that for yourself. So how can you make it easier? Maybe the answer really is in figuring out how to make things lighter. Can you make it more fun? That's a great favorite of mine. I love it when things have a fun atmosphere, a fun feeling. I always feel that I'm much more productive when I'm with friends, when there's a fun reward at the end, when I feel like the material or the content that I'm working on is fun. So make things fun for yourself. Decide, you know what, I'm not gonna make this more difficult with stress, anxiety, achievement fantasies.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:04]:
I'm just gonna do what is needed and I'm gonna get through this and it's going to be easy. I think you're gonna love this strategy when you get really good at it and keep applying it over and over again. You're gonna see that your productivity just skyrockets. Alright. We are up to strategy number 5 which is the last 1 on the list. This is also a very deeply important strategy. I would love for you to allow yourself to be patient with yourself. I think we are taught to be productive.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:42]:
We are taught to not make mistakes. We are taught to be responsible. And, of course, these are all wonderful traits and we should not lose these lessons. But I think something that we are not taught oftentimes is the practice of sitting with ourselves, being patient with the process, being patient with our own journey of learning and becoming who we want to be. I think we can fall into pits of despair. We can fall into pits of stress and panic when we see other people making rapid progress or making really healthy progress and we're in a zone where we're more trying to test things out, figuring out what might be the best path for us and then we get distracted because we lose patience. We get distracted because we get envious of how other people have it easier than we might. We get upset when we don't have our results in hand right away.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:53]:
But there's a beauty in knowing when to run and when to be calm and not be running all the time. And I just wanted to add this strategy into this list because it's a very important part of knowing how to support yourself. It's knowing when to keep yourself calm. It's knowing how to endure moments of uncertainty. It's about knowing that things are gonna turn out in the end anyway. So why put our bodies, put our minds into an arc of stress before we end up at that desired results? We're gonna get there. So we might as well get there feeling calm, feeling like we've done the entire process, we've gone through it responsibly and we have been patient with ourselves. Try it out if you're a stressor by nature or by training, I would love for you to just try your next project as an experiment, a new experiment for how to do things responsibly, but with calm and patience in your heart that you know and trust your process and yourself and you know and trust that you're going to get to the result that you desire.

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:14]:
Alright. So I've gone through the 5 strategies just to review them. 1, is to use nature. Get out into nature if you need a refresh or a jolt of energy or a calming moment, use nature. It's always there ready to support you. The second strategy is look at how you're thinking about yourself and question whether those thoughts are actually stopping you from being fully creative, fully imaginative, and fully productive. The third strategy is to deepen your level of trust in yourself. Just work on that moment to moment every single day, in my opinion.

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:53]:
I think that would be my recommendation. The 4th strategy, see how you can make your work and your life much much easier. Eliminate the stress, eliminate the drama when it's just overly dramatic. And finally, remember to always have room to have patience for yourself. When we're not kind to ourselves, you know what, trouble starts to happen. We start to get that upset and that stress inside of ourselves and we really wanna keep our internal space clear of clutter and clear of stress and drama. So before we wrap up session number 1 of this 4 part series, I would love to give you a few exercises that you can try on for yourself if you feel inclined. So the questions that I have for you include, what questions might I ask myself so that I can arrive at better possibilities and answers for myself? What questions have you forgot to ask yourself? Ask those questions to yourself.

Dr. Christine Li [00:21:57]:
Now take some time to step back from your work, step back from the life plans that you're building and ask yourself, can I come up with some questions that are gonna help me further develop the quality of my performance? A second question I have for you is, in which way or direction can I experiment today or override my fears and past habits, so that I can see what might be an easier path for me? So how can you change things up just a little bit? Maybe you can do a 4 part podcast series, something like that, just to conquer your fears and make things a little bit easier. I'm hoping that by my producing this series for you, you have an easier time of understanding my message, what I've learned over the years, and ways to really speed up without stressing yourself out. That's my major goal is to help you do better in your own life while also enhancing your life in the process. The last question I have for you is a hypothetical one that I would love for you to entertain. If you believed in yourself a 1000% completely, no question at all, how would you act? And then when you think about your answer to those questions, if you fully believed in yourself and how would you act? Come up with those answers, put that on a piece of paper as a list and then pick one of those items or maybe a few and start acting in that way today. Why wait until you fully trust yourself to act in a way that you know is gonna be good for you? I believe the trust is going to grow moment to moment as you apply these strategies and as you love yourself throughout the day and I would say go for it, go and act today as if you believed in yourself 1000%, 10000% more than you ever have. Alright, my friends, I send you a big hug. Thank you so much for listening to my 1st episode of this 4 part series.

Dr. Christine Li [00:24:21]:
And our next episode, session 2, is going to be called Connecting With Your Unique Talents. I can't wait to share those ideas with you next week. Thank you so much for tuning in to this series and to the Make Time For Success podcast. I hope you have a great week. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time For Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you 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.

Dr. Christine Li [00:25:01]:
Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. 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.