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And every single day that you just focus on controlling what you can control. You are putting your foot down and saying, I don't want to live here anymore. I don't want to live in this past anymore. I'm demanding something different.
Welcome to the Make Up Your Mind podcast. I'm your host Jahleane Dolne, and I'm here to help you make up your mind - literally and figuratively. I'm a motivational speaker, content creator, subconscious mindset coach, and the founder of The Postgrad Playbook- the only coaching platform and resource center for post-grads and 20 somethings to release mindset blocks and take action towards their chosen career , no matter how, quote unquote, unconventional that might look.
As an expert recognized by Afrotech, LinkedIn news,, and more, I help you identify what you actually want, release what's keeping you stuck, and have a game plan to take action with clarity, confidence, conviction, and ease. Here we cover all things, paving your own way and how that looks personally and professionally. Get ready to finally make up your [00:01:00] mind.
Let's get started.
Hi, happy Wednesday. And welcome back to another episode of makeup. Your mind. I am on vacation right now in California, but I was looking at the calendar and it's July. I can't believe we already made it to July six months of the year have completely flown by. Just with the time passing it's made me think about if we've even gotten close to accomplishing our new years goals or how far we may have strayed away from them.
With every passing year in January, it's so easy to be like, oh, new year, new me. But then as the months go by, sometimes we settle into past habits. And we don't actually end up where we want to be. So I felt like this episode can be a really good check-in point and also a very good time to hit the restart button.
If you are someone who's straight off their path
If you do fall into this boat, I'm sure you can empathize with there not being a worse feeling than getting to the end of the year or getting to the end of the quarter, whatever that you said, you'd set your goals by and it's [00:02:00] completely. It's just not it things are looking exactly the same.
There's just no worse feeling than getting to the end of the year and realizing that when you're making the vision board for 2025, it's exactly what you wanted for 2024. It feels like heartbreak. It feels like self portrayal and for today's episode, we're going to go through how to make sure that that's not you.
So we're going to do a whole course correction and even if you feel like this, isn't you, I think that there are some really good tactical tips in this episode to make sure that you are doing everything that you can to make sure that you stay on the right path and maybe even some techniques that you haven't heard of.
If you've been listening to some of the past episodes, you know that a couple of years ago, I quit my job cold Turkey. If you want to hear the whole story about that, go listen to the episode of how to know when it's time to quit your job, because I go through all the highs and lows and indications of when it's time for you to make the jump.
But when I did, I was in a space that was completely new to me.
I didn't have a job. I was a little bit aimless and I wasn't really sure what was going to happen next. So I absolutely absolutely needed to plan
but when I [00:03:00] did as expected, I went through a whole period that was completely foreign to me but I knew that I could make something work.
I knew that there is more out for me there as you probably do as well, but had to learn how to create it and put the right systems in place to be able to make progress, even if it might have not seemed like it was there yet.
It was mid 2020. We all know the pandemic had happened and everyone was on Tik TOK at the time. And as you know, your, for you page starts to know you very, very well.
So my, for you page started to pick up that I was someone who was super into personal development and also career related content. So somehow in another, I started getting pushed a lot of podcasts that were personal development, focus and career focus, which was perfect for helping me get back on the right track after once again, like I said, feeling so aimless and without direction.
These podcasts and also the content that I was consuming. Aggressively motivated me to follow my joy, which side note, whenever you follow your joy and follow the path that leads to the most happiness and feels expansive. That's [00:04:00] when you're going to really start seeing the change that you actually want in your life.
Start to happen. Miraculous opportunity show up serendipitous occurrence has happened. That is truly the path that you will find what you're looking for at the end. But back to the story.
Following that joy to me meant starting to create content, starting to figure out what I truly wanted with my life and getting rid of a lot of the loony beliefs, keeping me stuck an, a version of myself that was meant to appease other people, rather than who I wanted to be.
The very first episode of this podcast. What's my purpose anyways. He walks you through exactly how to figure out what that would look like authentically for you. I feel like it's a staple of this podcast, so I encourage you to go back and give it a listen.
If you're someone who is struggling, figuring out what that looks like to you.
So like I mentioned, following that joy, Matt finally starting to create content, putting myself out there and figuring out what a ideal career path would look like for me, which was being a speaker at being a founder and growing what I now know as my media company, the post-grad playbook.
Of course. I know that this is so much easier said than [00:05:00] done it. Wasn't like I woke up one day out of bed and birds were chirping and Disney music was playing in the background and I decided I'm exactly going to do X, Y, and Z. And I'm going to get to all these amazing results and accomplish everything.
That's on my vision board. No, like it took a lot of work and it took a lot of planning, which I'm going to be breaking down for you today.
There are a lot of reasons why you are not currently where you want to be, but I found that the biggest one that people don't really talk about are the limiting beliefs that are wedged in your subconscious mind. So the first thing that I did when I decided that I'm going to go through his whole rebrand and I took this massive brave action towards my dream reality. Was I dove into these podcasts and I dove into personal development books and I dove into people who were exactly where I wanted to be and saw what they did. I saw the formula. I saw exactly what worked out for them. And I took an inventory of what I would need to do to be able to get to where they are. And tweak it a little bit to get to where I want to be.
And there is a common theme throughout a lot of what they're saying. It included [00:06:00] visualizations and included taking action. It included taking stocks of limiting beliefs. It included all of these things. And after six months of implementing these tips that I'm about to give you consistently. It led to a amazing results.
Not only was I able to Atlanta job at the peak of the band dynamic. I make my Tik TOK account blew up and I grew tens of thousands of followers. I got featured in LinkedIn. I joined tech talks creator program. The job that I landed, served as a foundation, allowing me to move to New York out of the south and out of my parents' house. Post-grad my life took a complete 180 after six months of consistency from there, I was able to give back. So I was able to help several of my friends start landing jobs in tech.
I was able to put out a tech talk that helped other people learn how to land jobs in tech. And then they were able to tell their friends. So this really ended up being the gift that kept on giving.
What I consistently think about is that if I didn't put in the work with implementing the tips, I'm about to give you over the course of six months, what ripple effects would have not happened. Another way of [00:07:00] looking at this, is that what is the cost of inaction?
Yes, you might not be okay with letting yourself down, which is a whole nother conversation in itself. But think about if you didn't let yourself down, how many other people would be affected positively. Think about how much the world can change . By you just going all in
if you are someone who struggles with self sabotage last week's episode was about how to identify and overcome it.
But one thing that we talked about in that episode, that was incredibly crucial to my plan was getting to the root cause of why you're stuck. Like I mentioned, there are reasons why you are not currently where you want to be. You just have to be very transparent and accountable and identifying and owning up to those reasons. A lot of times they are subconscious blocks. Like we mentioned, a couple past episode, your subconscious mind runs about 90 to 95% of your programming and your decision-making.
It is your inner most truest self that you don't consciously have access to. So if you have these limiting beliefs holding you back in your subconscious mind that you have not identified, you're going to repeat the same cycle [00:08:00] over and over and over and over and over again, and never reached the dreams that are on your vision board.
Since these limiting beliefs and fears are deeply wired into your subconscious. You don't consciously have access to them. You can't. Consciously see your blocks sometimes when you're around other people and you get triggered, your blocks might come up. But one thing that you can do is I put together a list of 14 questions, I will help you get to the root of your subconscious blocks. Pertaining to the situation that I will send to you completely for free. All you have to do is send me a screenshot and review of this podcast. On Instagram at the post-grads and I'll send you that PDF.
That's not available anywhere else.
Getting to the root of these subconscious blocks is the key to your freedom. If you've been someone who's tried failed, try it again, fail, try it again. Failed. But you feel like you're self-sabotaging over and over and over again. These subconscious blocks will keep you stuck and keep you from a reality that it might see as unsafe because it is unfamiliar.
And these subconscious blocks can seem like they're coming out of nowhere.
What you might feel like is an irrational fear of what your friends might think about [00:09:00] you or your family or society, or you going against the status quo to pave your own way which is something that is all too common.
For a lot of people having it all does seem scary for a lot of people. Failing does seem scary, so they don't even try. Figure out what that looks like for you and follow the steps in that episode of completely rewire
so that way you can push forward and proceed with the next steps , without the self-sabotage.
Now that you understand what the root of the problem is you have to develop a crystal clear image of who you are at the end of the year and also their daily routine and start showing up as them. . Are you someone who goes to the gym at 5:00 AM. Are you someone who wakes up at 5:00 AM?
Where do you eat? Who do you hang out with? What do you wear?
It's so important to incorporate all five of your senses so that you can create a realistic image in your mind's eye and start to program and get comfortable with the idea of who you are at that level, because the reason why we've kept ourselves stuck for so long is because you aren't comfortable with that end result, but seeing it over and over and practicing, visualizing it on a daily basis will give you the [00:10:00] space to become more comfortable over time.
For me that looked like just starting to post content, which is not something that's completely unattainable. You just pull out your phone and start recording a video to put on TikTok. It's not something that is so far-fetched out into the future.
My point is is that these are things that you can start doing right now. If you want it to make the change, you can do it right now.
This is not something you have to put off and through actively doing visualization meditations, even for five minutes a day, it can drastically change the decisions that you keep making.
During the six months period, I realized that every single little thing that we do is to decision. I was watching a video the other day and this might come off as a little. Woo woo. But bear with me for a second. and It explained that every single possible scenario and result already exists. Their explanation was that it already exists because there are an infinite number of realities and an infinite number of possibilities.
If you've seen the movie everything everywhere all at once, you probably understand this a little bit, but there are an infinite number of outcomes that could happen. And so every time you make a decision, [00:11:00] you're choosing and aligning one, one of those outcomes more and more closely, but every single time you make a decision that falls in line with what you're currently doing you're staying on the same path. You aren't actively choosing a new path.
So if my new year's resolution was to have a six pack by the end of the year, but I never went to a gym. How's that six pack gonna appear. You can draw it on, but it's not going to be real. If every day you make the decision to not head to the gym or not do a workout or not go on a walk, you're not going to position yourself any closer to the result that ends with you having a six pack.
But if you wake up every day, go to the gym and you have a plan you're pivoting your path and pivoting towards a reality where you're getting closer and closer to the end version of you that does have that six pack.
Moving on to the third thing that I did that completely changed the game for me is I completely got rid of my last vision board and made a new one that aligned with the visualizations that I had, and also aligned with the limiting beliefs that I knew I had through doing the work and answering those 14 questions I mentioned earlier.
If you aren't familiar with what a [00:12:00] vision board is, it's basically when you have a bunch of pictures that you find in magazines, or maybe on Pinterest. Online or whatever, and he put them on a board and it sums up what your dream life would look like.
It sums up what car you want, what house you want. Maybe how many fellows you want on social media, what school you might want to go to, right. Everything that you would want for your life. It's summed up through pictures on a board. The reason why vision boards work so well is that your brain can not tell the difference between real and imagined experiences. So if you're constantly looking at something or an image, and you're feeling the feelings that it provokes as if it was yours, you're going to subconsciously make decisions that are going to lead you closer to that end result is going to lead you towards having that in your life.
So when it comes to you changing your life for the next six months, having an accurate representation of, what you want it to look like is extremely, extremely important. There is inspiration everywhere. If you just Google what you'd like, if you want to live in a brownstone, you can put that on your vision board. Maybe there's a specific one that you want and you [00:13:00] can Photoshop the photo or use canvas. Canva to make that picture extremely vivid and extremely realistic. So it's the exact one that is on the house.
Let's say that you are someone who wants a thousand subscribers on YouTube. What you can do is you can take a screenshot of your channel. And instead of it saying, the subscriber count that you currently have, it says 1,100 subscribers or 1000 subscribers.
So that in your mind's eye, you're seeing that over and over and over again, and you start subconsciously acting like someone who does have about 1000 subscribers.
The important thing to do when you are picking up pictures is just to make sure that the pictures that you're feeling evoke, the feeling that you want to have when you finally get that thing
so, for example, if you want a brownstone and let's say you see two different brownstone apartments,
You're going to want to pick the one that appeals to you. Most the one that evokes the most emotion. So that you're going to have more of a reaction towards it, and also be more inclined to take the actions towards what you actually want. You don't want to pick pictures.
That don't mean anything to you or this won't work.
And it's always super rewarding when you get to the end of the year. And you can finally check off the things that you [00:14:00] accomplish on your vision board and know that you're not living in the same life that you did the year prior.
We talked about figuring out the root cause of visualizations and also the vision board. One thing you might notice is that when you're putting this all together, you might feel a little bit of resistance in your chest. You might hear a limiting belief in your head.
That is probably not even your own voice, telling you all the reasons why it can't happen. After you've gone through the root cause. Exercise, you can create affirmations that are the inverse of the limiting belief that you found through the root cause, exercise and asking you questions. So, for example, if you were someone who uncovered the limiting belief, that if I decided to do X, Y, and Z, then my partner won't like me anymore, or my partner would break up with me even though you might consciously know that that's not true. And you might write that off as a subconscious belief, it would be best to create that as an affirmation and show all the ways that you are loved and supported as you make progress.
Affirmations are extra effective as you're falling asleep because your brain is more open to suggestion and once again, this will help move you towards the overall goal and decrease any resistance that you might feel.
The [00:15:00] next step is mastering getting into the flow state, where you can get the work done that you really need to much more easily. Do you ever get really excited to do one task that is going to lead you towards that thing that you really really want? And as you get closer and closer, maybe you sit down to do it. It's like you keep getting distracted. Maybe you look at your phone and it just feels like you're pulling teeth.
For me, sometimes it feels like I'm lugging one of those huge cement wheels up a hill, trying to get into a flow state or getting to this state where accomplishing my work is a lot easier.
I looked up the definition for flow. And it says that it means that it is the optimal state of consciousness and those highest moment of total absorption by the activity we are into in such a way that we lose our own sense of existence in such states time seems to fly and the performance of such person goes through the roof.
When it comes to topping into a flow state, you have to be doing something that causes you a little bit of joy and is something that's going to be a little bit difficult for you.
So you do have to put in a considerable amount of effort to [00:16:00] be fully immersed in this task
flow states can be hard to get into and it can be difficult to immerse ourselves in our work sometimes because it feels like going from zero to 100, you feel like should be able to sit down and get all that you need to accomplish done within that hour long period or however long you've allotted for this.
But you go into every experience like this with agitation and resistance off the back.
You, aren't going to sit down and want to do this, especially if you're battling, limiting beliefs along the way.
So it's really important to do things like minimize distractions, understand the end goal and have that intrinsic motivation to be able to continue to push that Boulder up the hill until you get to the very top where it feels like it can fall down the hill and then you're completely in flow.
Personally for me during these times, I am a do not disturb warrior. You can not get me to look at my phone. Cause I know that the second I look at my phone, it's done.
It's over. I'm not getting back into flow. So my phone is on silent. It's on, do not disturb. Nobody is talking to me and I know that I have one task and I'm going to get that done.
The next tip that I implemented, that allowed me to get all of those [00:17:00] amazing results was taking a look at the influences around me and hiring and firing as I saw fit.
I will tell you one thing that I am declaring is a fact. It is a hundred percent easier to do the glove that you were looking for when you don't have someone in your ear telling you all the reasons that you can't or all the reasons why it's not possible. It is always possible for you. Like I mentioned, there are multiple different end games for you. It might not be possible for them because they're stuck in a limited mindset, but for you, it's possible.
Negative influences really do have the ability to dictate so much of what's going on in our lives. So you have to be so meticulous and cutthroat on what you're consuming, actively and inactively. The music we listened to, the people we follow on social media, the friends that we have around us, if there is a way that you can exhale a lot of that in your life.
Absolutely. 100% do it because the worst possible outcome is you staying stuck in a place that you don't want to be in because you have these influences constantly reminding you of who that past version of yourself is. So you're almost straddled [00:18:00] in between a two possibilities where you've been and where you want to go. And when you did that higher visualization exercise of where you want to go and who do you want to be?
Do they have those influences? Most likely not.
One of my last tips is to actively create an alter ego. Sometimes when we're moving towards a new identity and a new form of embodiment, it's hard to detach who we've been to, who we are going to be. One example of this is Beyonce. When she was starting to really pop out on the scene, she is naturally an introvert.
So she had a hard time performing to her full potential and what she knew that she could do. So she instead created her alter eco a Sasha fierce, and obviously we know who Beyonce is and how she performs when she's on stage, but she doesn't identify with that every single time she identifies with Sasha fierce when she steps onto the stage, same thing with Kobe Bryant when he was playing and he really needs to get into beast mode and really ball out to be able to secure all the titles and championships that he's won.
He created the [00:19:00] black Mamba.
It was tapping into superhuman strength. So sometimes when it comes to you, making those new decisions, tap into your alter ego that does the things that you actually want to do rather than unfavorable habits.
One of the last things that I'll say is that this is much easier said than done.
It takes around 30 days to build a new habit. And one of the biggest things is just starting and being okay with it. Not being perfect. It's okay to be a beginner again.
And the fruits of your efforts have to be seen over time rather than immediately.
One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever received was from an old mentor who said to me that all I'm responsible for is controlling what I can control. You control what you do every single day. And if you commit to doing that over long periods of time, it has to lead to something.
And every single day that you just focus on controlling what you can control. You are putting your foot down and saying, I don't want to live here anymore. I don't want to live in this past anymore. I'm demanding something different.
If you're looking for some additional resources to set yourself back on the right path, I can definitely send you those 14 questions.
Like I mentioned earlier, just screenshot [00:20:00] or interview that you've left me on apple podcasts and send it to you at the post-grads playbook on Instagram. Also go ahead and check out some of those past podcast episodes I have mentioned, and I do have a 30 day reset guide for you that you can use to map out everything we talked about today and set yourself on the right path in just 30 days.
So once again, thank you so much for joining me on another episode of makeup, your mind. I am rooting for you, like always, and I will see you next Wednesday by.
